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health advisory Hospital Doctor Yu 2007-11-8 19:08:51

This was from a Simulation of Disease Transmission lab. The spread of the disease in our simulation was very rapid. Within a few minutes many people were infected. Why is the spread of infections slower in real life? Thank you for your answers.

Answers:

A quotation by Harvey J Gold, Author of Mathematical Modelling of Biological Systems, may go towards assisting your analysis of the situation:

" The result of a mathematical development should be continuously checked against one's own intuition about what constitutes reasonable biological behaviour. Whenever such a check reveals disagreement, the following possibilities must be considered:

a : A mistake has been made in the formal mathematical development

b: The starting assumptions are incorrect and/or constitute a too drastic oversimplification

c: One's own intuition about the biological field is inadequately developed.

d: A penetrating new principle has been discovered. "

Do let me know whether you found meaning in the above, and if you did analyse your model based on the checks recommended by him, what among a,b,c,d was the reason of the discrepancy. Of course this is assuming that you have already established the discrepancy beyond doubt.

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coz it depends on the immune system of each person

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Actually, the spread of disease is not really slower.the acuteness of the infection is the variable. While many may get a disease, most will have asymptomatic infection.no one will actually know they have the disease, for it is so mild that symptoms don't show up. Do NOT try this with Ebola, Marburg, HIV, Hep C, or other deadly diseases as a proof. But you could try common influenza..many are called but few come down with the disease so strongly that symptoms arise.

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Depending on whether it is a bacterial or viral infection(with the exeption of HIV and Cancer)it eats through your immune system, if your immune system is weak(you haven't been eating your vegies)then you get infected faster, if not then you've made the right choices.

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Hard to say without knowing what your mathematical model is. A couple of guesses..

Does your model assume a 100 % probability of infection every time someone comes in contact with the infected person? This isn't true in real life because even for extremely virulent infections, our immune systems are good for something.

Does your model include a latency time between the time a person becomes infected and the time he becomes contagious? For example, when a person gets infected with chicken pox, it takes a couple of weeks before he can transmit the virus to someone else.

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