Incorporating population dynamics into household models of infectious disease transmission

Abstract

Most household models of disease transmission assume static household distributions. Although this is a reasonable simplification for assessing vaccination strategies at a single point in time or over the course of an outbreak, it has considerable drawbacks for assessing long term vaccination policies or for predicting future changes in immunity. We demonstrate that household models that include births, deaths and movement between households can show dramatically different patterns of infection and immunity to static population models. When immunity is assumed to be life-long, the pattern of births by household size is the key driver of infection, suggesting that the influx of susceptibles h..