Epidemics (eBook)

This book is designed to be a practical study in infectious disease dynamics. It offers an easy-to-follow implementation and analysis of mathematical epidemiology. It focuses on recent case studies in order to explore various conceptual, mathematical, and statistical issues. The dynamics of infectious diseases shows a wide diversity of pattern. Some have locally persistent chains-of-transmission, others persist spatially in consumer-resource metapopulations. Some infections are prevalent among the young, some among the old and some are age-invariant. Temporally, some diseases have little variation in prevalence, some have predictable seasonal shifts and others exhibit violent epidemics that may be regular or irregular in their timing.

Ottar Bjornstad researches population dynamics of epidemiological and ecological outbreaks. Focal systems includes human infections like measles, whooping cough, rubella, SARS-CoV-2 and influenza; animal infections like rabies, hantavirus and distemper; and outbreaks of various insects of biomedical and agricultural concern. He has expertise in statistical and computational approaches to the study of spatiotemporal dynamics, including the development of a suite of statistical methods for the analysis of spatial and temporal data as implemented in various R packages. Dr. Bjornstad is a Distinguished Professor of Entomology and Biology holds the J. Lloyd & Dorothy Foehr Huck Chair of Epidemiology at the Pennsylvania State University and is an elected fellow of the Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters, American Association for the Advancement of Sciences and the Ecological Society of America.