Mathematical Biosciences

With significant population fractions in many societies who refuse vaccines, it is important to reconsider how vaccination is incorporated into compartmental epidemiology models. It is still most common to apply the vaccination rate to the entire class of susceptibles, rather than to use the more realistic assumption that the vaccination rate function should depend only on the population of susceptibles who are willing and able to receive a vaccination. This study uses a simple generic disease m...

Visceral leishmaniasis (VL) is considerably more severe among individuals infected with human immunodeficiency virus (HIV), leading to higher parasite loads, frequent relapse, and increased mortality. To examine the epidemiological interaction between the two diseases, we develop a comprehensive VL-HIV co-infection model that incorporates transmission pathways, treatment effects, and relapse dynamics. The model is parameterized using real-time data from Bihar, India, including monthly VL-only an...

Schistosomiasis is a neglected parasitic disease caused by various trematode species of the genus Schistosoma for which 251 million people needed treatment in 2021. Many mathematical models of Schistosoma mansoni transmission incorporate the effect of chemoprophylaxis on parasite burden within the human host. While praziquantel is the most commonly implemented pharmaceutical used to control schistosomiasis, due to its applicability over several species and its negligible side effects, it is not ...

The COVID-19 pandemic has presented severe challenges in understanding and predicting the spread of infectious diseases, necessitating innovative approaches beyond traditional epidemiological models. This study introduces an advanced method for automated model discovery using the Sparse Identification of Nonlinear Dynamics (SINDy) algorithm, leveraging a dataset from the COVID-19 outbreak in Thuringia, Germany, encompassing over 400,000 patient records and vaccination data. By analysing this dat...

We present results from the second season of Influcast, a multi-model collaborative forecasting hub focused on influenza in Italy. During the 2024/25 winter season, Influcast collected one-to four-week-ahead probabilistic forecasts of influenza-like illness (ILI) incidence alongside influenza A and B ILI+ incidence signals. New ILI+ targets were constructed integrating syndromic surveillance data with virological detections collected weekly by the Italian National Institute of Health. Forecasts ...

The COVID-19 pandemic exposed major vulnerabilities of hospital capacity and management worldwide, particularly in intensive care units (ICUs) and emergency rooms (ER), imposing prompt adaptation and resource reallocation. Although SARS-CoV-2 is no longer endangering healthcare systems, winter seasons continue to bring recurrent overload of critical care services, primarily due to respiratory infections. In France e.g., this pattern led to the reactivation of the national emergency response plan...

Epigenetic clocks estimate biological age from DNA methylation patterns at CpG sites, providing robust predictions of mortality and morbidity risk. "Blue zones"--regions of exceptional longevity--offer a unique opportunity to investigate how biological aging diverges from chronological age. However, standard clocks are typically trained on large, heterogeneous datasets, reflecting average population trends rather than region-specific dynamics. Using data from the Costa Rican Longevity and Health...

BackgroundTraumatic events, such as terror attacks and war, are expected to impact mental health. These potential effects can be explored by assessing the mental health of the general population of Israel, from before the events of October 7, 2023 and over the course of the Swords of Iron war. MethodsGeneral population data were collected from Jewish adults in Israel before October 7 (April 2022), after October 7 (December 2023), and over the course of the ongoing war (March 2024, June 2024, Fe...

We describe a fast, noninvasive, low-cost survey method designed to understand the mode of transmission of an emerging pathogen. It is inspired from the standard household prevalence survey consisting in sampling households and counting the total number of people infected in each household, but refines it with the aim of improving diagnosis and estimating more parameters of the model of intra-household transmission. The survey was carried out in May-June 2020, during part of the first national ...

Wastewater is increasingly being recognized as an important data stream that can contribute to infectious disease surveillance and forecasting. With this recognition, a growing number of statistical inference approaches are being developed to use wastewater data to provide quantitative insights into epidemiological dynamics. However, few existing approaches have allowed for systematic integration of data streams for inference, for example by combining case incidence data and/or serological data ...

Background: Human-to-human transmission of pathogens fundamentally depends on interactions among infectious and susceptible individuals, yet traditional population-scale models often overlook the stochastic, behaviour-driven, and highly heterogeneous nature of these interactions. Methods: Here, we develop a large-scale actor-based model capturing early epidemic dynamics of a novel respiratory pathogen on dynamic contact networks. We build these networks upon explicitly integrating detailed demog...

Nipah virus (NiV) is a sporadic yet extremely deadly zoonotic pathogen, with reported case fatality rates of 40%-75% in impacted areas. Prolonged incubation, documented relapse, and delayed-onset encephalitis following apparent recovery indicate that NiV dynamics are influenced by intricate temporal processes. However, mechanistic contributions of these processes to epidemic persistence remain poorly understood. In this study, we develop and analyze a delay differential equation model for NiV tr...

BackgroundDengue fever is a major neglected tropical disease with a rapidly rising global burden, and localized outbreaks are increasingly reported in southern subtropical China. Fujian Province, a coastal subtropical region with favorable ecological conditions for Aedes albopictus breeding and frequent cross-border exchanges with dengue-endemic areas, has had continuous local dengue cases for over a decade, raising concerns about the establishment of a stable natural endemic focus. Sustained lo...

IntroductionAtmospheric conditions under climate change increase pressure on healthcare systems. Especially, the intensive care units (ICU) are vulnerable due to low buffer capacity and high utilization rates. MethodsDaily ICU cases from 2009 to 2023 were derived from the German statutory health insurance data of eleven regional AOK insurances. Cases were stratified by age and sex. Generalized additive models were used to investigate the associations between daily ICU cases and lagged atmospher...

Chronic pain has been identified as a risk factor for cognitive decline in later life. However, most studies measure pain at a single time point and none have investigated whether variations in pain severity are associated with changes in cognitive function over time. This project aimed to assess the relationship between individual-level change in pain severity and decline in cognitive function over time. We used data from the English Longitudinal Study of Ageing (ELSA), a cohort of nationally r...

Suicide is one of the worlds leading public health problems, with more than 720,000 deaths annually. Suicide has traditionally been studied from an individual perspective. However, research has increasingly highlighted the influence of community-level factors on suicide risk. This study aimed to (1) analyse the spatial distribution of suicide mortality at the provincial level in Spain (2018-2022); (2) perform stratified analyses by sex and age group; and (3) compare suicide risk across differen...

Dengue is one of the worlds highest-burden arboviral diseases. Although classically considered an urban disease, many regions experience a substantial dengue burden in rural areas. The combined influence of long-term climate, short-term weather variation, local built environments, and land-use gradients on dengue dynamics in rural settings remains poorly understood, limiting our ability to predict shifting risk under global change. Here, we investigate these dynamics in Costa Rica to disentangle...

BackgroundEpigenetic clocks based on DNA methylation (DNAm) provide quantitative indicators of biological aging. However, the extent to which diverse lifestyle factors influence DNAm-based aging measures remains unclear, especially in Japanese populations. We aimed to evaluate the associations between 52 lifestyle-related factors and multiple epigenetic aging indicators, including six DNAm ages (Horvath, Hannum, PhenoAge, GrimAge, GrimAge v2, and PCPhenoAge specific to Japanese Population), the ...

BackgroundConcern about long-term health effects of repetitive head impacts in football has increased, but it remains unclear whether position-specific exposure patterns were associated with differential long-term all-cause mortality among elite players across the 20th century. MethodsWe conducted two retrospective cohort studies of elite male professional football players. The World Cup cohort included all players on the team rosters from FIFA World Cup tournaments (1930-1990), and the UEFA Eu...

BackgroundHelicobacter pylori infection accounts for 98% of gastric cancer (GC) cases in Japan. Since 2013, the nationwide expansion of H. pylori eradication therapy to chronic gastritis patients has created a unique opportunity to evaluate its population-level impact on GC primary prevention. However, short-term reductions in GC deaths are difficult to interpret given the long natural history of gastric carcinogenesis. This study aimed to assess the early impact of population-level eradication ...