Predicting the course of meningococcal disease outbreaks in closed subpopulations.

A stochastic epidemic model was applied to meningococcal disease outbreaks in defined small populations such as military garrisons and schools. Meningococci are spread primarily by asymptomatic carriers and only a small proportion of those infected develop invasive disease. Bayesian predictions of numbers of invasive cases were developed, based on observed data using a stochastic epidemic model. We used additional data sets to model both disease probability and duration of carriage. Markov chain Monte Carlo sampling techniques were used to compute the full posterior distribution which summarized all information drawn together from multiple sources.