Assistant Professor Kei Ito and Professor Taro Yamamoto of the Department of International Health, Institute of Tropical Medicine, Nagasaki University, together with Professor Satoshi Morita of the Faculty of Engineering, Shizuoka University, have developed and presented a mathematical model of sexually transmitted diseases that simultaneously considers complex networks and mother-to-child transmission.
Sexually transmitted diseases are spread mainly by two routes: sexually transmitted infections and mother-to-child transmission.Based on this, if a mathematical model that reproduces the spread of sexual infectious diseases can be constructed, it will be possible to propose an effective spread prevention strategy.
This time, the group is the first mathematical model in the world to enable the simultaneous prediction of sexually transmitted diseases that spread across generations, taking into account sexually transmitted infections and mother-to-child transmission, based on the complex network of sexual contact. Was successfully developed.When the sexual contact frequency shown in existing studies was introduced into a mathematical model, the average number of secondary infections (basic reproduction number) produced by each infected person was greatly affected by sexually transmitted infections. Surprisingly, it became clear that mother-to-child transmission contributed little.This result indicates that prevention of mother-to-child transmission alone cannot suppress the spread of infectious diseases.However, the mathematical model also shows that it is not meaningless to prevent mother-to-child transmission because there are always infected persons derived from mother-to-child transmission.
The mathematical model developed by this result is expected to be useful for predicting the spread of viral sexually transmitted diseases such as HTLV-1 and HBV.
Paper information:[Applied Mathematics and Computation] Demography of sexually transmitted infections with vertical transmission
