A Multi-risk Model for Understanding the Spread of Chlamydia
Chlamydia trachomatis, CT, infection is the most frequently reported sexually transmitted infection in the United States. To better understand the recent increase in disease prevalence, and help guide in mitigation efforts, we created and analyzed a multi
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Abstract Chlamydia trachomatis, CT, infection is the most frequently reported sexually transmitted infection in the United States. To better understand the recent increase in disease prevalence, and help guide in mitigation efforts, we created and analyzed a multi-risk model for the spread of chlamydia in the heterosexual community. The model incorporates the heterogeneous mixing between men and women with different number of partners and the parameters are defined to approximate the disease transmission in the 15–25 year-old New Orleans African American community. We use sensitivity analysis to assess the relative impact of different levels of screening interventions and behavior changes on the basic reproduction number. Our results quantify, and validate, the impact that reducing the probability of transmission per sexual contact, such as using prophylactic condoms, can have on CT prevalence. Keywords Mathematical modeling · Sexually transmitted infection · STI · Chlamydia · Epidemic model · Basic reproduction number · Sensitivity analysis
1 Introduction Over 1.8 million cases of chlamydia trachomatis, CT, are reported each year [35] in the United States. This sexually transmitted infection (STI) is a major cause of infertility, pelvic inflammatory disease, and ectopic pregnancy among women [7, 8, 14, 15, 17, 28, 32, 40, 41], and has been associated with increased HIV acquisition and transmission [7, 13, 14, 17, 28, 31, 32, 39–41]. Untreated, an estimated 16 % of, women with CT will develop PID [33], and 6 % will have tubal infertility [38]. We A. Azizi · L. Xue · J.M. Hyman (B) Department of Mathematics, Tulane University, New Orleans, LA 70118, USA e-mail: [email protected] A. Azizi e-mail: [email protected] L. Xue e-mail: [email protected] © Springer International Publishing Switzerland 2016 G. Chowell and J.M. Hyman (eds.), Mathematical and Statistical Modeling for Emerging and Re-emerging Infectious Diseases, DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-40413-4_15
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developed and analyzed a multicompartmental risk-based heterosexual transmission model that can be used to help understand the spread of the disease and quantify the relative effectiveness of different mitigation efforts. Mathematical models create frameworks for understanding underling epidemiology of diseases and how they are correlated to the social structure of the infected population [9, 11, 12, 18–25]. Transmission-based models can help the medical/scientific community to understand and to anticipate the spread of diseases in different populations, and help them to evaluate the potential effectiveness of different approaches for bringing the epidemic under control. The primary goal of our modeling effort is to create a model that can be used to understand the spread of CT and to predict the impact of screening, sexual contact tracing, and treatment programs on mitigating the CT epidemic. In modeling the spread of CT, the population is divided into the susceptible sexually active population (S), the exposed infected, but not infectious
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