Quantifying the Impact of Two Pinning Control Strategies on HIV Incidence

Abstract

The ability to quantify the impact of interventions in disease management is important from a public health perspective. The impact of two local control strategies are explored for a scale-free sexual contact network. The network is used to model the spread and incidence of HIV and subjected to pinning control of nodes at random and thereafter selectively pinning nodes with the highest degree. Infections are dependent on a stochastic function to capture the discrete nature of infections. New cases of people that have acquired the Human Immunodeficiency Virus (HIV) in the network are measured over a period of a year and also over a period of 5 years, with the pinned nodes controlled from the moment they get infected. Measurements are compared between pinning control schemes and to the uncontrolled scenario. The resulting comparisons indicated that selective pinning reduced the incidence in a large network (>1000 nodes) by at least 68%, compared to random pinning. This result is consistent with selective pinning control schemes employed in other scale-free dynamical networks.