Projections Of Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome In Australia Using Data To The End Of September 1989

In addition to a comprehensive discussion of methods for gauging the extent of the epidemic and forecasting AIDS incidence, this book presents methods and results concerning the risks of HIV transmission, the incubation period of HIV infection, markers of disease progression, prevention strategies, including strategies to protect the blood supply, and the evaluation of treatments and vaccines. These topics are presented quantitatively, with an emphasis on the strengths and weaknesses of available data. The book highlights how a naive statistical approach to the design or analysis of such studies can lead to seriously misleading results. The various methods of monitoring and forecasting HIV disease and AIDS incidence are given thorough treatment.

Infectious disease accounts for more death and disability globally than either non-infectious disease or injury. This book contains a breadth of different quantitative approaches to understanding the patterns of infectious diseases in populations, and the design of control strategies to lessen their effect. The contributors bring a great variety of mathematical expertise (including deterministic and stochastic modelling and statistical data analysis) and involvement in a wide range of applied fields across the spectrum of biological, medical and social sciences. The aim is to increase interaction between specialities by describing research on many of the infectious diseases that affect humans, including both viral diseases like measles and AIDS and tropical parasitic infections. The papers are divided into groups dealing with problems relating to transmissible diseases, vaccination strategies, the consequences of treatment interventions, the dynamics of immunity, heterogeneity of populations, and prediction.

This book discusses systematically treatment on the development of stochastic, statistical and state space models of the HIV epidemic and of HIV pathogenesis in HIV-infected individuals, and presents the applications of these models. The book is unique in several ways: (1) it uses stochastic difference and differential equations to present the stochastic models of the HIV epidemic and HIV pathogenesis; in this sense, the deterministic models are considered as special cases when the numbers of different type of people or cells are very large; (2) it provides a critical analysis of deterministic and statistical models in the literature; (3) it develops state space models by combining stochastic models and statistical models; and (4) it provides a detailed discussion on the pros and cons of the different modeling approaches. This book is the first to introduce state space models for the HIV epidemic. It is also the first to develop stochastic models and state space models for the HIV pathogenesis in HIV-infected individuals.