Network Dynamics and Simulation Science Lab, Virginia Bioinformatics Institute at Virginia Tech, Blacksburg, Virginia, United States of America.
PLoS One. 2011;6(9):e25149. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0025149. Epub 2011 Sep 22.
This research compares the performance of bottom-up, self-motivated behavioral interventions with top-down interventions targeted at controlling an "Influenza-like-illness". Both types of interventions use a variant of the ring strategy. In the first case, when the fraction of a person's direct contacts who are diagnosed exceeds a threshold, that person decides to seek prophylaxis, e.g. vaccine or antivirals; in the second case, we consider two intervention protocols, denoted Block and School: when a fraction of people who are diagnosed in a Census Block (resp., School) exceeds the threshold, prophylax the entire Block (resp., School). Results show that the bottom-up strategy outperforms the top-down strategies under our parameter settings. Even in situations where the Block strategy reduces the overall attack rate well, it incurs a much higher cost. These findings lend credence to the notion that if people used antivirals effectively, making them available quickly on demand to private citizens could be a very effective way to control an outbreak.
本研究比较了自下而上、自我激励的行为干预与针对控制“流感样疾病”的自上而下干预的效果。这两种类型的干预都使用了环策略的变体。在第一种情况下，当一个人直接接触者中被诊断出患有疾病的人数比例超过阈值时，这个人会决定寻求预防措施，例如疫苗或抗病毒药物；在第二种情况下，我们考虑了两种干预方案，分别称为 Block 和 School：当一个人在一个普查块（或学校）中被诊断出患有疾病的人数比例超过阈值时，对整个普查块（或学校）进行预防。结果表明，在我们的参数设置下，自下而上的策略优于自上而下的策略。即使在 Block 策略可以很好地降低总体发病率的情况下，它也会带来更高的成本。这些发现证明了这样一种观点，即如果人们能够有效地使用抗病毒药物，那么快速按需向普通公民提供这些药物可能是控制疫情的一种非常有效的方法。
