Meningitis, pathogenicity near criticality: the epidemiology of meningococcal disease as a model for accidental pathogens (Q2177213)

This paper studies the epidemiology of meningococcal disease as a model for accidental pathogens. The model is based on a standard SIR epidemic spreading model for the natural harmless infection process and further considers a mutant type of bacteria sending affected host to a \(Y\) class. The hosts carrying the harmless strain is denoted as \(I\) and the diseased cases are \(X\). It is assumed that \(Y\) hosts can give rise to a transition to the diseased \(X\) class with a certain transition rate \(\varepsilon\). But they have the same characteristics as the original bacteria in hosts of the harmless variant responsible for the \(I\) class. The invasion dynamics of mutant strains has been investigated. The paper also determines divergent fluctuations for vanishing pathogenicity. Distribution of total number of cases has also be derived. Some numerical results have been produced in different regions of \(\varepsilon\) to validate the theoretical results.