Provisional Topics

Core Topics:

• Introduction of the fundamental principles, including basic model structures for different diseases.
• How model equations are constructed to reflect biology (e.g. modes of transmission, whether immunity occurs or not).
• How age structure and heterogeneity in risk behaviour or disease susceptibility are incorporated.
• How the basic reproduction number is calculated.
• Stochastic and spatially-explicit models are also explained.

Special Topics:

• Vector-borne diseases: a multi-species ecosystem.
• The herd effect in infectious disease epidemiology.
• Planning mass vaccination campaigns.
• Hospital-acquired infections: where stochasticity rules.
• Macroparasites: the causes and effects of parasite aggregation.

Computer practicals:

• Designing a model of tuberculosis transmission.
• Introducing Berkeley Madonna as a tool for modelling.
• Estimating key parameters from an outbreak of influenza.
• Exploring heterogeneous behaviour in a model of sexually transmitted diseases.
• Stochasticity in infectious disease modelling

Keynote lectures:

• Mathematical models and infectious diseases: successes of the past and challenges for the future.
• Health economics of infectious disease control.
• Interventions against HIV in Zimbabwe
• The Schistosomiasis Control Initiative.
• Human Papillomavirus Vaccination.
• Schistosomiasis: from models to data.
• Seasonality of infectious diseases.
• BSE and vCJD: Mad cows and Englishmen.
• HIV, UNAIDS and models for a global pandemic.
• Bacterial genetics, epidemiology and evolution.
• Bovine TB: science, policy and dogma.
• Planning for Pandemic Influenza.
• Preparing for future infectious disease threats.

Projects:

• HIV/AIDS: Antiretroviral therapy and HIV transmission in a developing country context.
• Malaria & onchocerciasis.
• Avian influenza.
• SARS: real-time response to the 2003 Hong Kong epidemic .