Concepts and Models
Concepts and Models
This chapter discusses the epidemiology of tuberculosis from the perspective of population biology. The central concept of population biology with reference to TB control is that a population of organisms (here TB cases) cannot persist if the generation case reproduction number, R, is maintained below the critical value of one. Hence, if one case of TB always generates less than one secondary case on average (R < 1), then Mycobacterium tuberculosis is doomed to extinction. The chapter first provides an overview of the empirical epidemiology of TB before introducing a family of dynamic models to investigate the key questions about TB epidemiology and control. The models are used to assess TB transmission, reinfection and relapse, variation in infectiousness, rise and fall of TB during the industrial revolution, and the characteristics of TB epidemics.
Keywords: epidemiology, tuberculosis, population biology, TB control, Mycobacterium tuberculosis, empirical epidemiology, TB transmission, reinfection, relapse, infectiousness
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