Omar Saucedo

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  Human Movement and Vector-Borne Diseases
  Omar Saucedo

  Vector-borne diseases affects approximately 1 billion people and accounts for 17% of all infectious diseases. With travel becoming more frequent across the world, it is important to understand how spatial dynamics impact the spread of the disease.  Human movement plays a key part on how a disease can be distributed as it enables a pathogen to invade a new environment, and helps the persistence of a disease in locations that would otherwise be isolated.  In this talk, we explore how spatial heterogeneity combines with mobility network structure to influence vector-borne disease dynamics.  In addition, we will derive an approximation for the basic reproduction number for a n-patch ODE system using a Laurent series expansion, and construct sensitivity equations to determine which parameters should be targeted for intervention strategies.

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  Computing Human to Human Avian Influenza R0 via Transmission Chains and Parameter Estimation
  Omar Saucedo

  The transmission of avian influenza between humans is extremely rare, and it mostly affects individuals who are in contact with infected family member. Although this scenario is uncommon, there have been multiple outbreaks that occur in small infection clusters with relatively low transmissibility, and thus are too weak to cause an epidemic. Still, subcritical transmission from stuttering chain data is vital for determining whether avian influenza is close to the threshold of R0 >1. In this presentation, we will explore two methods of estimating R0 using transmission chains and parameter estimation through data fitting.