Article ID: | iaor20072427 |
Country: | Netherlands |
Volume: | 148 |
Issue: | 1 |
Start Page Number: | 5 |
End Page Number: | 23 |
Publication Date: | Nov 2006 |
Journal: | Annals of Operations Research |
Authors: | Kress Moshe |
Keywords: | simulation: applications, health services |
Handling bioterror events that involve contagious agents is a major concern for authorities and a cause for debate among policymakers about the best response policy. At the core of this debate stands the question which of the two post-event policies to adopt: mass vaccination or trace (also called ring or targeted) vaccination. We present a new dynamic epidemic-intervention model that captures key features of the situation and generalizes some previous assumptions regarding the probability distributions of inter-temporal parameters. It is shown that a mixture of mass and trace vaccination policies – the prioritized vaccination policy – is more effective than either of the two aforementioned policies.