MODELLI SPAZIO-TEMPORALI DI DIFFUSIONE, PREVISIONE E CONTROLLO DELLE EPIDEMIE DI COLERA: DAL SUDAFRICA AD HAITI

Abstract

Understanding, predicting and controlling the dynamics of cholera and other waterborne diseases are crucial goals of public health policies. Appropriate quantitative models to forecast epidemic development and to evaluate possible intervention scenarios would be specially needed during epidemic outbreaks, when preparedness and efficient allocation of resources are key to emergency management. Moreover, these tools ought to be spatially explicit, because waterborne disease epidemics usually display spatially inhomogeneous patterns. Here we describe spatially explicit epidemiological models and methods for real-time forecast of waterborne disease epidemics and design of intervention strategies for epidemic prevention and control. Applications to two cholera epidemics in South Africa and Haiti are briefly illustrated.