Abstract
Ebola virus disease (EVD) is a severe infection with an extremely high fatality rate spread through direct contact with body fluids. A promising Ebola vaccine (rVSV-ZEBOV) may soon become universally available. We constructed a game-theoretic model of Ebola incorporating individual decisions to vaccinate. We found that if a population adopts selfishly optimal vaccination strategies, then the population vaccination coverage falls negligibly short of the herd immunity level. We concluded that eradication of Ebola is feasible if voluntary vaccination programmes are coupled with focused public education efforts. We conducted uncertainty and sensitivity analysis to demonstrate that our findings do not depend on the choice of the epidemiological model parameters.
Highlights
Ebola virus disease (EVD), formerly known as Ebola haemorrhagic fever, is an acute and often fatal viral infection caused by viruses of the genera Ebolavirus from the family Filoviridae [1]
The fundamental question we are interested in is this: if the population adopts the optimal (Nash equilibrium) vaccination rate, would it be possible to eradicate the disease? We find that the optimal vaccination rate falls short of the herd immunity vaccination rate, which is a typical outcome for similar models of many other diseases
Voluntary vaccination protocols present the following challenge: if a certain proportion of the population is already vaccinated, the cost of vaccination can outweigh the risk of infection
Summary
Ebola virus disease (EVD), formerly known as Ebola haemorrhagic fever, is an acute and often fatal viral infection caused by viruses of the genera Ebolavirus from the family Filoviridae [1] It is transmitted through direct contact with body fluids (blood, urine, saliva, sweat, faeces, vomit, breast milk and semen) from infected or recently deceased infectious individuals, contaminated objects (needles and syringes) and wild animals (fruit bats and primates) [1,2]. Those who contract the disease experience flu-like symptoms for the first 1–3 days of the infection, such as fever, headache, muscle aches and fatigue [3]; which are later followed by additional afflictions, like vomiting, diarrhoea, abdominal pains, loss of appetite and haemorrhages [1,3,4].
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