Risk of Infectious Disease Outbreaks by Imported Cases with Application to the European Football Championship 2012

Attila Dénes, Péter Kevei, Hiroshi Nishiura and Gergely Röst

International Journal of Stochastic Analysis, 2013, vol. 2013, 1-9

Abstract:

The European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control called the attention in March 2012 to the risk of measles in Ukraine among visitors to the 2012 UEFA European Football Championship. Large populations of supporters travelled to various locations in Poland and Ukraine, depending on the schedule of Euro 2012 and the outcome of the games, possibly carrying the disease from one location to another. In the present study, we propose a novel two-phase multitype branching process model with immigration to describe the risk of a major epidemic in connection with large-scale sports-related mass gathering events. By analytic means, we calculate the expected number and the variance of imported cases and the probability of a major epidemic caused by the imported cases in their home country. Applying our model to the case study of Euro 2012 we demonstrate that the results of the football games can be highly influential to the risk of measles outbreaks in the home countries of supporters. To prevent imported epidemics, it should be emphasized that vaccinating travellers would most efficiently reduce the risk of epidemic, while requiring the minimum doses of vaccines as compared to other vaccination strategies. Our theoretical framework can be applied to other future sport tournaments too.

Date: 2013
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://downloads.hindawi.com/journals/IJSA/2013/576381.pdf (application/pdf)
http://downloads.hindawi.com/journals/IJSA/2013/576381.xml (text/xml)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:hin:jnijsa:576381

DOI: 10.1155/2013/576381

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in International Journal of Stochastic Analysis from Hindawi
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Mohamed Abdelhakeem ().