Cholera dynamics on community networks (13rit168)

The Banff International Research Station will host the "Cholera dynamics on community networks" workshop from to .

Suppose that we have a set of communities, connected together by a network, for example by waterways or roads. When can a disease invade this network? If it can invade, what are the resulting disease dynamics? The answers to these questions should intuitively depend upon both the community characteristics (e.g. population density, sanitation, health care services in a given community), together with the network structure. The purpose of this project is to investigate this in the context of cholera, which has drawn much recent attention due to severe outbreaks in Haiti, West Africa, Zimbabwe, and elsewhere. Preliminary results from our research group indicate that the network structure and patch characteristics combine in elegant ways to govern the ability of a disease to spark an outbreak. We seek here to deepen our understanding of these relationships, which touch upon several different areas of mathematics, and to understand their influence on other aspects of the disease, such as seasonal oscillations.

The Banff International Research Station for Mathematical Innovation and Discovery (BIRS) is a collaborative Canada-US-Mexico venture that provides an environment for creative interaction as well as the exchange of ideas, knowledge, and methods within the Mathematical Sciences, with related disciplines and with industry. The research station is located at The Banff Centre in Alberta and is supported by Canada's Natural Science and Engineering Research Council (NSERC), the U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF), Alberta's Advanced Education and Technology, and Mexico's Consejo Nacional de Ciencia y Tecnología (CONACYT).