Temporal Analysis II The Components of Disease

In this chapter we will model the mechanisms at the level of the individual infection process, including latent period, infectious period, formation of daughter infections, etc., and study what type of dynamics result in the population of plants. Thus, the primary goal of Chapters 5 is not to choose equations to fit data, per se, but to determine the implications of basic biological processes on the population dynamics of disease. We first develop a series of disease progress models, from very simple caricatures of epidemics, to more complex and realistic ones. Based on the analysis of these models, we discuss when and why epidemics will develop, how fast they will increase and what levels of severity (or incidence) they will reach or approach. This chapter deals with models for polycyclic diseases with many disease cycles during an epidemic. Such epidemics are generally initiated with a very low level of infection.

Chapter topics include:

Introduction

Disease Progress Models with Fixed Host Density