The effect of travel restrictions on the spread of a moderately contagious disease
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BioMed Central
Open Access
Research article
The effect of travel restrictions on the spread of a moderately contagious disease Martin Camitz*1,2,3,4 and Fredrik Liljeros3 Address: 1Swedish Institute for Infectious Disease Control, Solna, Sweden, 2Department of Medical Epidemiology and Biostatistics, Karolinska Institute, Solna, Sweden, 3Department of Sociology, Stockholm University, Stockholm, Sweden and 4Theoretical Biological Physics, Department of Physics, Royal Institute of Technology, Stockholm, Sweden Email: Martin Camitz* - [email protected]; Fredrik Liljeros - [email protected] * Corresponding author
Published: 14 December 2006 BMC Medicine 2006, 4:32
doi:10.1186/1741-7015-4-32
Received: 17 July 2006 Accepted: 14 December 2006
This article is available from: http://www.biomedcentral.com/1741-7015/4/32 © 2006 Camitz and Liljeros; licensee BioMed Central Ltd. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
Abstract Background: Much research in epidemiology has been focused on evaluating conventional methods of control strategies in the event of an epidemic or pandemic. Travel restrictions are often suggested as an efficient way to reduce the spread of a contagious disease that threatens public health, but few papers have studied in depth the effects of travel restrictions. In this study, we investigated what effect different levels of travel restrictions might have on the speed and geographical spread of an outbreak of a disease similar to severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS). Methods: We used a stochastic simulation model incorporating survey data of travel patterns between municipalities in Sweden collected over 3 years. We tested scenarios of travel restrictions in which travel over distances >50 km and 20 km would be banned, taking into account different levels of compliance. Results: We found that a ban on journeys >50 km would drastically reduce the speed and geographical spread of outbreaks, even when compliance is < 100%. The result was found to be robust for different rates of intermunicipality transmission intensities. Conclusion: This study supports travel restrictions as an effective way to mitigate the effect of a future disease outbreak.
Background Knowledge of the speed at which a contagious disease travels between geographical regions is vital for making decisions about the most effective intervention strategies. The actual routes a disease will take are strongly determined by how individuals travel within and between regions [1-4]. As was shown during the outbreak of severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) [5], current travel patterns enable contagious diseases to spread to far corners of
the globe at alarming rates. This demonstrates the need for a new type of model that incorporates travel networks. Several authors have responded to t
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