Coupling in-host and between-hosts dynamics of infectious diseases

Venue: Sala seminari Dipartimento di Fisica, via Sommarive, 14 - Povo (TN)
At: 3:00 p.m.

Speaker:

• Maria Vittoria Barbarossa (Heidelberg University)

Abstract:
After a disease outbreak, recovered individuals constitute a large immune population, however their immunity is waning in the long term and they may become susceptible again. At the same time, the host's immune system can be boosted by repeated exposure to the pathogen, which is linked to the density of infected individuals present in the population. This prolongs the length of the host's immunity.  Such an interplay of  within host and population level dynamics poses significant challenges in rigorous mathematical modeling of immuno-epidemiology. In this talk  we present a multiscale modeling approach for disease dynamics,  monitoring the immune status of individuals and including both waning immunity and immune system boosting. A coupled system of ordinary and partial differential equations allows to investigate the temporal evolution of the distribution of immunities in a population, showing that different immune boosting mechanisms lead to very different stationary distributions of the immunity at the endemic steady state. Special cases of the general model will be considered, in particular a class of systems with constant and distributed delays.

A seguire, vi saranno brevi presentazioni su temi collegati di Valentina Marziano (FBK), Andrea Pugliese e Maira Aguiar (Dip. Matematica, Unitn)

Contact person: Andrea Pugliese