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Incorporating household structure into a discrete-event simulation model of tuberculosis and HIV

Published: 02 September 2011 Publication History

Abstract

Human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) increases the risks of developing tuberculosis (TB) disease following infection, and speeds up disease progression. This has had a devastating effect on TB epidemics in sub-Saharan Africa, where incidence rates have more than trebled in the past twenty years. Current control methods for TB disease have failed to keep pace with this growth, and there is an urgent need to find TB control strategies that are effective in high-HIV prevalent settings. This article describes a discrete-event simulation model of endemic TB that includes the effects of HIV and of household structure on the transmission dynamics of TB. Incorporating a social structure allows us to compare the effectiveness of contact-tracing interventions with case-finding targeted at high risk groups. We describe the modeling of the household structure in some detail, as this has applications to the modeling of other infectious diseases.

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    cover image ACM Transactions on Modeling and Computer Simulation
    ACM Transactions on Modeling and Computer Simulation  Volume 21, Issue 4
    August 2011
    115 pages
    ISSN:1049-3301
    EISSN:1558-1195
    DOI:10.1145/2000494
    Issue’s Table of Contents
    Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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    Publication History

    Published: 02 September 2011
    Accepted: 01 May 2010
    Revised: 01 October 2009
    Received: 01 May 2009
    Published in TOMACS Volume 21, Issue 4

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    Author Tags

    1. Disease modeling
    2. HIV
    3. developing countries
    4. health
    5. simulation
    6. tuberculosis

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