We study the relation between different social behaviors and the onset of epidemics in a model for the dynamics of sexual transmitted diseases. The model considers the society as a system of individual sexuated agents that can be organized in couples and interact with each other. The different social behaviors are incorporated assigning what we call a promiscuity value to each individual agent. The individual promiscuity is taken from a distribution and represents the daily probability of going out to look for a sexual partner, abandoning its eventual mate. In terms of this parameter we find a threshold for the epidemic which is much lower than the classical SIR model prediction, i.e., R0 (basic reproductive number)=1. Different forms for the distribution of the population promiscuity are considered showing that the threshold is weakly sensitive to them. We study the homosexual and the heterosexual case as well. © 2003 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.
CITATION STYLE
Gonçalves, S., Kuperman, M., & Da Costa Gomes, M. F. (2003). Promiscuity and the evolution of sexual transmitted diseases. In Physica A: Statistical Mechanics and its Applications (Vol. 327, pp. 6–11). https://doi.org/10.1016/S0378-4371(03)00429-1
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