A complex systems approach to infectious disease surveillance and response

Abstract

The transmission of infectious diseases can be affected by various interactive factors at or across different scales, such as environmental factors (e.g., temperature) and physiological factors (e.g., immunity). In view of this, to effectively and efficiently monitor and response to an infectious disease, it would be necessary for us to systematically model these factors and their impacts on disease transmission. In this paper, we propose a complex systems approach to infectious disease surveillance and response that puts a special emphasis on complex systems modeling and policy-level decision making with consideration of multi-scale interactive factors and/or surveillance data of disease prevalence. We demonstrate the implementation of our approach by presenting two real-world studies, one on the air-borne influenza epidemic in Hong Kong and the other on the vector-borne malaria endemic in Yunnan, China. © Springer International Publishing 2013.