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Herd Immunity Demonstration
- danielford 14y agoThese simulations are wonderful. I'll be showing some of them to my microbiology class later this semester when I discuss vaccines. I wish there was a simulation for ring vaccination though. It would be a nice visual aid for explaining how smallpox was eradicated.
- oconnor0 14y agoRing vaccination?
- JulianMorrison 14y agoIntentionally creating a pocket of herd immunity around an outbreak.
- mistercow 14y agoIt's a process where you contain outbreaks by identifying them and vaccinating everyone who might come in contact with an infected person. You create a "ring" of vaccinated people around the infected, which prevents the infection from spreading.
- ghshephard 14y agoFrom: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smallpox http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smallpox "In the early 1950s an estimated 50 million cases of smallpox occurred in the world each year.[5] To eradicate smallpox, each outbreak had to be stopped from spreading, by isolation of cases and vaccination of everyone who lived close by. This process is known as "ring vaccination". The key to this strategy was monitoring of cases in a community (known as surveillance) and containment."
- mark_integerdsv 14y agoReading this reminded me of an anti AIDS campaign we have here in South Africa. I can't bring to mind the catch-phrase but the gist of it is that one HIV free generation could stop the virus forever.
- damncabbage 14y agoInteresting. Like what fire-fighters do with bushfires: remove the fuel to contain the outbreak.
- JumpCrisscross 14y agoI found Vynnycky & White's An Introduction to Infectious Disease Modelling [1] fantastically interesting to go through. I know games are the traditional "fun" way to learn a programming language, but simulating a Resident Evil or 28 Days Later apocalypse is, for me, far more interesting :). [1] http://www.amazon.com/An-Introduction-Infectious-Disease-Modelling/dp/0198565763/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1360366453&sr=8-1&keywords=infectious+disease+modelling http://www.amazon.com/An-Introduction-Infectious-Disease-Mod...
- ChuckMcM 14y agoNicely done. Now if they could add freeloader tipping point as a function of population mobility it would really drive the point home.
- marcelsalathe 14y agoThis is a cool visual demonstration of the concept. The concept of herd immunity, and how it breaks down, especially due to personal opinions, is my main research interest. I've published a couple of papers over the years, for those who are interested (all are open access): The effect of opinion clustering on disease outbreaks http://rsif.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/5/29/1505.full.pdf+html http://rsif.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/5/29/1505.ful... Assessing Vaccination Sentiments with Online Social Media: Implications for Infectious Disease Dynamics and Control http://www.ploscompbiol.org/article/info:doi/10.1371/journal.pcbi.1002199 http://www.ploscompbiol.org/article/info:doi/10.1371/journal... Complex Social Contagion Makes Networks More Vulnerable to Disease Outbreaks http://arxiv.org/abs/1211.0518 http://arxiv.org/abs/1211.0518
- csense 14y agoIt would be interesting to run the freeloader situation with 1% freeloaders, 2% freeloaders, ..., 99% freeloaders, each 1000 times, and plot the probability that more than half the population are eventually infected as a function of the number of freeloaders. I'm thinking the graph will show a sharp spike at a critical transition probability because it's a similar model to percolation [1]. In fact I may write my own simulation for this. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Percolation_threshold http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Percolation_threshold
- fnordfnordfnord 14y agoAs pointed out by a commenter at the site, the simulation doesn't address mortality rates of disease outbreaks. Nor does it address the risks associated with vaccination. If taken seriously, it's likely to leave some with mistaken perceptions.
- TazeTSchnitzel 14y agoOT: Surprisingly, I was able to use this in the Opera Mini mobile proxy browser. The fact the server preserved page state and streamed page updates meant it actually worked surprisingly well, albeit with a low framerate.
- SoftwareMaven 14y agoMy wife works as a pediatric nurse. It is sad to see the impacts as parents make idiotic decisions and more and more kids are gettings sick with potentially life-threatening diseases. I think we have dropped below the level of herd immunity.
- noonespecial 14y agoThis is excellent. I'm going to add it to my little bag of arguments for those times I encounter anti-vaccine types. Its futile to argue with them that vaccines aren't (statistically) harmful, they've already made up their minds. So I agree. All medical interventions are harmful in some cases. Instead, I simply ask them what makes them special that they should be allowed to avoid the small risk of the vaccine as opposed to everyone else. After all, if no one was vaccinated, there would be polio epidemics, which most will concede are worse than the risks posed by vaccines. Asking them why they are exempt from preventing polio while everyone else must shoulder the burden often turns a mindless stream of conspiracy jargon into an almost stunned pause. I'd pay for an app that runs this simulation just to make this point sharper.
- toolz 14y agohttp://www.vaclib.org/intro/present/polio.gif http://www.vaclib.org/intro/present/polio.gif I'm not anti-vaccine, but I am anti-sensational unsubstantiated claims, such as without the polio vaccine there would be epidemics.
- JumpCrisscross 14y agoThat's a graph of the death rate from polio, not the number of deaths from polio. Polio drugs existed before the polio vaccine (and still exist today). Similarly, one could graph U.S. mortality rates over the 20th century, observe its generally smooth downward slope, and conclude that nothing done after 1980 had any effect on anything. Or graph world mortality rates over the second millenium and similarly write off the 20th century. Maybe this is just a case for logarithms?
- toolz 14y agoPrecisely my point. The vaccination had no critical effect on any graph and the decreased incidents of polio following suggest a natural progression of technology and disease knowledge and awareness. The drugs that existed before the vaccine were not in wide scale production and play no relevant part in considering the impact of polio on the public.
- billpg 14y agoRemember, some of those green squares don't just turn blue, they die.
- tomkinstinch 14y agoAs an aside, red and green are poor color choices for things like this where color perception is necessary for discrimination. I'm colorblind and cannot differentiate the "infected" squares from the green ones. Black would be a better choice than red. In fact, everything could be grayscale.