Week 1: Discussion on choice of disease and questions

[Wirichada Pan-ngum]

By the end of the week, I would like you to submit to the discussion board.

The disease topic you are interested to explore as your individual assignment – choose one that you are familiar with and clarify the scope of your research e.g. is it at a region/country/ global level?

What research questions you want to use the modelling approach to gain better understanding? – could be assessing impacts of interventions, estimating key parameters, better understanding the transmission or impacts of external factors on transmission.

Your friend and I will make some comments to help shape up the research project. (10 points)

Note: I think it might help to search on Pubmed or google using the keywords such as mathematical modelling, transmission dynamics, XXX (disease), XXX (interventions interested) for example.

[Wichayapat Thongrattana]

I choose Tomato flu as my topic of interest.

My study will focus on upsurge of Tomato flu in India at country scale.

The research questions I wish to answer are predicting progression of pandemic(case estimation) and finding key parameters which driven the outbreak for preventive measure.

[Wirichada Pan-ngum]

Interesting one. Little is known still about this infection. I wonder if we can model it like influenza. I read that it could also be difficult to diagnosed and currently it is confirmed after ruling out dengue, chikungunya, zika virus, varicella-zoster virus, and herpes etc. If the objective is to estimate cases and finding risk factors, I think the modelling will be relying on some good data and good clinical studies that determined risks. I am not sure if either has been done. It is a pretty new disease, right?

[Wichayapat Thongrattana]

Thank you for your reply Aj.Wirichada,

According to this journal (https://journals.lww.com/pidj/Fulltext/9900/Kerala_Tomato_Flu___A_Manifestation_of_Hand_Foot.160.aspx), Tomato flu is caused by enteroviruses(EV) Coxsackie A16 (CA16) which is the same EV that cause Hand Foot and Mouth disease(HFMD). Although their sequence are not identical, Phylogenetic analysis show that both shared same ancestor as clade in China(https://cdn-links.lww.com/permalink/inf/e/inf_1_1_2022_08_03_tang_pidj-222-641_sdc1.pdf).

Therefore, a new virus which emerge in India is merely a variant of HFMD. If that’s the case, I may adopt idea, structure and dataset of HFMD modeling in other country to estimate the case and to find the risk factor in India.

Do you have any comment for this idea?

[Wirichada Pan-ngum]

Agreed with the structure of the model. More importance is what research questions would be appropriate for modelling?

[Wichayapat Thongrattana]

The research question would be “What is the major risk factor driving the Tomato flu pandemic in India and how contagious is it?”

[Wirichada Pan-ngum]

Further thinking around this question is how these factors could be incorporated into the model. For example if we focus on internal factors like high contacts or age, it is easily explored in the structure we have.

[Karina Dian Lestari]

I am interested in investigating the risk of getting malaria for travelers who travel to area with stable transmission. The area I am interested in is the forestry area in Sumatera island, such as Aceh and Bengkulu provinces.

[Wirichada Pan-ngum]

In the course you will hear about Force of Infection, this dynamic index directly determines the risk of catching infections in an area. You will probably need some measure from the vector side and some background information such as immunity of the travelers from various areas.

[Karina Dian Lestari]

Thank you for the feedback, Ajarn Pan. I’m interested in doing similar things to this paper https://malariajournal.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/1475-2875-8-296#Sec8 which trying estimate the risk of non-immune individual acquiring falciparum malaria when traveling to the Amazon region of Brazil. Indonesia has similar forestry areas where the workers come from low transmission areas so they are very much at risk of getting malaria when working in the forest. However, I’m not sure if the data on the immunity of the travelers is available here. I’ll try to look up in some of the previous studies.

[Arwin Jerome Manalo Onda]

Hi Professor, I’d like to do n sexuality-based predictive modelling on the HIV epidemic in the Philippines. There has been an initial work (https://philsciletters.net/2014/PSL%202014-vol07-no01-p062-066%20David%20Gomez.pdf) which was published in 2014. I’d like to input newer data or tweak the model based on the latest set of data from the Philippine HIV registry. The probable research goal is to provide supplementary evidence on the key population whom to provide the interventions to mitigate the spread of HIV.

Do you think this is feasible within the bounds of the lectures provided on this course?

[Wirichada Pan-ngum]

Interesting paper. I think it is straightforward modelling if you have data for model fitting. You may try to adjust the model template in this course to this one already and see if it could run.

[Napisa Freya Sawamiphak]

I am interested in using mathematical modeling to estimate hepatitis B disease in Thailand and probably the impact of the HBV vaccine. There are a few related articles:
https://academic.oup.com/ije/article/34/6/1329/707548?login=false
https://www.hindawi.com/journals/cmmm/2014/475451/.

There is one study using Thai data: https://science.buu.ac.th/ojs246/index.php/sci/article/view/1623/1551. However, it is outdated (2017), it would be nice if I can put newer data and re-estimate the disease dynamics and impact of vaccination.

I am also interested in Hepatitis C among injecting drug users, but there is limited data on this topics (https://journals.lww.com/aidsonline/Fulltext/2008/08200/New_challenges_for_mathematical_and_statistical.1.aspx, https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0022519318305666)

[Wirichada Pan-ngum]

The first paper in the list suggested a good model structure for HepB I think. We probably need to take into account the two stages of infection, acute and chronic. The later is more of a problem. HepB vertical transmission (from mother to child) is mentioned a lot in modelling.

[Hazem Abouelfetouh]

Hello everyone,

I choose to explore the spread and transmission of Measles at the global level between immunized, infected, and recovered populations with recent data to see if it was affected by COVID-19 immunization and new measures taken by individuals to mitigate COVID-19 (masking, handwashing, distancing).

[Wirichada Pan-ngum]

Hi Hazem, in the next step please think more about the model structure of Measles and adding vaccination into the model as well. For the effect of COVID-19 as you mentioned, I am not sure how well we know about it to tie that up in this modelling. Please read and suggest some more ideas during the course.

[Ashaya.i]

I am interested in a mathematical model to study the coinfection dynamics of COVID-19 and bacterial pneumonia with community- and hospital-acquired pneumonia infections in Thailand. And also focusing on vaccination and hospital care intervention.
Here are the related articles;

https://arxiv.org/abs/2207.13265
https://aip.scitation.org/doi/pdf/10.1063/5.0082709

[Wirichada Pan-ngum]

The structure looks rather complicated because it involved two types of infections. Maybe we can somehow try to simplify the model structure or narrow down the scope of interest.

[Author]

Posts