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APS » Journals » Phys. Rev. Lett. » Volume 101 » Issue 7
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Phys. Rev. Lett. 101, 078101 (2008) [4 pages]

Disease Extinction in the Presence of Random Vaccination

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Mark I. Dykman1, Ira B. Schwartz2, and Alexandra S. Landsman2
1Department of Physics and Astronomy, Michigan State University, East Lansing, Michigan 48824, USA
2U.S. Naval Research Laboratory, Code 6792, Nonlinear Systems Dynamics Section, Plasma Physics Division, Washington, D.C. 20375, USA

Received 30 December 2007; published 11 August 2008

See accompanying Physics Synopsis

We investigate disease extinction in an epidemic model described by a birth-death process. We show that, in the absence of vaccination, the effective entropic barrier for extinction displays scaling with the distance to the bifurcation point, with an unusual critical exponent. Even a comparatively weak Poisson-distributed random vaccination leads to an exponential increase in the extinction rate, with the exponent that strongly depends on the vaccination parameters.

URL:
http://link.aps.org/doi/10.1103/PhysRevLett.101.078101
DOI:
10.1103/PhysRevLett.101.078101
PACS:
87.23.Cc, 05.40.−a
 
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