Math model series
revere | May 9, 2007Last week another mathematical modeling paper made the newswires. If you wonder how this happens, the answer is that universities and companies have PR departments that put out press releases. Services like ScienceDaily aggregate and package these press releases for journalists and others (like us). Since a mathematical paper in a specialized journal (in this case it is PLoS Computational Biology) is not likely to be read by a reporter, especially a reporter on deadline, it isn't surprising the news stories follow the press release rather than the paper. In this case, I am sorry to say, the…
revere | April 5, 2007[A series of posts explaining a paper on the mathematical modeling of the spread of antiviral resistance. Links to other posts in the series by clicking tags, "Math model series" or "Antiviral model series" under Categories, left sidebar. Preliminary post here. Table of contents at end of this post.]
This is the last in a long series attempting to explain a recent paper by Lipsitch et al. on mathematical modeling of the effects on influenza control of antiviral resistance, published in PLoS Medicine in January 2007. Modeling is a valuable technique but for most readers, even most scientists…
revere | April 4, 2007[A series of posts explaining a paper on the mathematical modeling of the spread of antiviral resistance. Links to other posts in the series by clicking tags, "Math model series" or "Antiviral model series" under Categories, left sidebar. Preliminary post here. Table of contents at end of this post.]
We have now gone through the entire paper on modeling the impact of antiviral resistance in an influenza control program, by Lipsitch et al., published in PLoS Medicine. Since a number of assumptions were made, we take some time to consider what effects they have on the model's results. In the…
revere | April 4, 2007Just as we are preparing to wind up our marathon series of posts on a mathematical model of antiviral resistance, a new paper has appeared in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) with data on antiviral resistance from Japan, the country that uses more Tamiflu and Relenza (the two available neuraminiase inhibitor antiviral drugs) than any other. It turns out the accompanying Editorial in JAMA specifically mentions the modeling paper and its results as a key to understanding the significance of this work. So all our labor has not been in vain. Here's more.
Our eye was caught…
revere | April 3, 2007[A series of posts explaining a paper on the mathematical modeling of the spread of antiviral resistance. Links to other posts in the series by clicking tags, "Math model series" or "Antiviral model series" under Categories, left sidebar. Preliminary post here. Table of contents at end of this post.]
We conclude our section by section examination of the mathematical modeling paper by Lipsitch et al., published in PLoS Medicine. We have finally arrived at the final section, Discussion (starting on page 8 of the .pdf version). In the second post we said many scientists read only the Abstract,…
revere | April 2, 2007[A series of posts explaining a paper on the mathematical modeling of the spread of antiviral resistance. Links to other posts in the series by clicking tags, "Math model series" or "Antiviral model series" under Categories, left sidebar. Preliminary post here. Table of contents at end of this post.]
In this post we explain the remaining results presented in the paper by Lipsitch et al. in published in PLoS Medicine (the subsections headed, "Effects of resistance on epidemic size" and "Dependence of outcomes o fitness cost and intensity of control" on page 6).
These sections and the…
revere | April 1, 2007[A series of posts explaining a paper on the mathematical modeling of the spread of antiviral resistance. Links to other posts in the series by clicking tags, "Math model series" or "Antiviral model series" under Categories, left sidebar. Preliminary post here. Table of contents at end of this post.]
We now take a look at what happens in the model when we vary the intensity of prophylaxis and treatment. The model treats the fraction of those prophylaxed, fp, and those treated, fT, separately, but for illustrative purposes the paper sets these two figures at the same number. In the previous…
revere | March 31, 2007[A series of posts explaining a paper on the mathematical modeling of the spread of antiviral resistance. Links to other posts in the series by clicking tags, "Math model series" or "Antiviral model series" under Categories, left sidebar. Preliminary post here. Table of contents at end of this post.]
We've spent a long time in the previous posts looking inside the black box of a mathematical model for the spread and consequences of antiviral resistance to Tamiflu (described in the paper by Lipsitch et al., published in PLoS Medicine). From the last post you will recall the authors assume it…
revere | March 30, 2007[A series of posts explaining a paper on the mathematical modeling of the spread of antiviral resistance. Links to other posts in the series by clicking tags, "Math model series" or "Antiviral model series" under Categories, left sidebar. Preliminary post here. Table of contents at end of this post.]
Now we are almost ready to run the model described in the paper, "Antiviral resistance and the control of pandemic influenza," by Lipsitch et al., published in PLoS Medicine. If you have been following up to this point, you will know the model described in the Methods section is a homogeneous…
revere | March 29, 2007[A series of posts explaining a paper on the mathematical modeling of the spread of antiviral resistance. Links to other posts in the series by clicking tags, "Math model series" or "Antiviral model series" under Categories, left sidebar. Preliminary post here. Table of contents at end of this post.]
In the previous posts we have walked through the Introduction and Methods sections of the paper, "Antiviral resistance and the control of pandemic influenza," by Lipsitch et al., published in PLoS Medicine. The Methods section sets out the detailed model, which is summarized in the Figure in the…
revere | March 28, 2007[A series of posts explaining a paper on the mathematical modeling of the spread of antiviral resistance. Links to other posts in the series by clicking tags, "Math model series" or "Antiviral model series" under Categories, left sidebar. Preliminary post here. Table of contents at end of this post.]
We need to finish the Methods section of the mathematical model in the paper, "Antiviral resistance and the control of pandemic influenza," by Lipsitch et al., published in PLoS Medicine. Then we can move on to Results. In this post we will deal mainly with paragraphs 3 and 4 of Methods on page 3…
revere | March 27, 2007[A series of posts explaining a paper on the mathematical modeling of the spread of antiviral resistance. Links to other posts in the series by clicking tags, "Math model series" or "Antiviral model series" under Categories, left sidebar. Preliminary post here. Table of contents at end of this post.]
We are now almost through with the mathematical part of the model in the paper, "Antiviral resistance and the control of pandemic influenza," by Lipsitch et al., published in PLoS Medicine (once Methods section is done, we will examine the Results, which are not mathematical but epidemiological…
revere | March 26, 2007[A series of posts explaining a paper on the mathematical modeling of the spread of antiviral resistance. Links to other posts in the series by clicking tags, "Math model series" or "Antiviral model series" under Categories, left sidebar. Preliminary post here. Table of contents at end of this post.]
We continue our examination of the paper, "Antiviral resistance and the control of pandemic influenza," by Lipsitch et al., published in PLoS Medicine. We have gotten to the point where our population is divided into five categories. We follow the course of the epidemic on each of its days by…
revere | March 25, 2007[A series of posts explaining a paper on the mathematical modeling of the spread of antiviral resistance. Links to other posts in the series by clicking tags, "Math model series" or "Antiviral model series" under Categories, left sidebar. Preliminary post here. Table of contents at end of this post.]
In this post we begin our look at the mathematical part of the model in the paper, "Antiviral resistance and the control of pandemic influenza," by Lipsitch et al., published in PLoS Medicine. The main model is presented in the first four paragraphs of the Methods section.
The Model: view from 50…
revere | March 24, 2007[A series of posts explaining a paper on the mathematical modeling of the spread of antiviral resistance. Links to other posts in the series by clicking tags, "Math model series" or "Antiviral model series" under Categories, left sidebar. Preliminary post here. Table of contents at end of this post.]
The Modeling Series (click Math Modeling Series under Categories in the left sidebar) is a moving target for me. Even though the first draft of the post you read each day was written at least three weeks earlier, each has also been freshly worked on as I go back and tinker and adjust and try to…
revere | March 24, 2007[A series of posts explaining a paper on the mathematical modeling of the spread of antiviral resistance. Links to other posts in the series by clicking tags, "Math model series" or "Antiviral model series" under Categories, left sidebar. Preliminary post here. Table of contents at end of this post.]
We are almost ready to begin a detailed examination of the mathematical model presented in the paper, "Antiviral resistance and the control of pandemic influenza," by Lipsitch et al., published in PLoS Medicine. The main model is presented in the first four paragraphs of the Methods.
Some…
revere | March 23, 2007[A series of posts explaining a paper on the mathematical modeling of the spread of antiviral resistance. Links to other posts in the series by clicking tags, "Math model series" or "Antiviral model series" under Categories, left sidebar. Preliminary post here. Table of contents at end of this post.]
As promised, this post will start a detailed examination of the paper by Lipsitch et al., "Antiviral resistance and the control of pandemic influenza," published in PLoS Medicine, section by section. We hope you have your own copy, available here (see previous post for more details). We'll start…
revere | March 22, 2007[A series of posts explaining a paper on the mathematical modeling of the spread of antiviral resistance. Links to other posts in the series by clicking tags, "Math model series" or "Antiviral model series" under Categories, left sidebar. Preliminary post here. Table of contents at end of this post.]
In this post we start to dig into a mathematical model of antiviral resistance in influenza. The modern era of mathematical modeling started early in the last century with attempts to understand malaria spread, almost exactly 100 years ago. For the first 50 of those years scientists used pure…
revere | March 21, 2007[A series of posts explaining a paper on the mathematical modeling of the spread of antiviral resistance. Links to other posts in the series by clicking tags, "Math model series" or "Antiviral model series" under Categories, left sidebar. Preliminary post here. Table of contents at end of this post.]
The use of antiviral drugs to prevent or manage a pandemic with influenza/H5N1 is both a mainstay of national and international pandemic plans and a source of controversy. Will there ever be sufficient doses to make a difference? If there were, could they be deployed and administered in time? If…
revere | March 20, 2007Tomorrow we begin a blog experiment, one we already judge has failed. In January Marc Lipsitch and his team at the Harvard School of Public Health published a splendid paper using a mathematical model to investigate the spread of antiviral resistance in the control of pandemic influenza. When we read it our first thought was to write a substantial blog post about the results. The paper was published in PLoS Medicine almost the same week as another mathematical model on spread through the air traffic system by Colizza et al. and the Colizza paper seemed to get most of the newswire notice. But…