Abstract
The European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control called the attention in March 2012 to the risk of measles in Ukraine among visitors to the 2012 UEFA European Football Championship. Large populations of supporters travelled to various locations in Poland and Ukraine, depending on the schedule of Euro 2012 and the outcome of the games, possibly carrying the disease from one location to another. In the present study, we propose a novel two-phase multitype branching process model with immigration to describe the risk of a major epidemic in connection with large-scale sports-related mass gathering events. By analytic means, we calculate the expected number and the variance of imported cases and the probability of a major epidemic caused by the imported cases in their home country. Applying our model to the case study of Euro 2012 we demonstrate that the results of the football games can be highly influential to the risk of measles outbreaks in the home countries of supporters. To prevent imported epidemics, it should be emphasized that vaccinating travellers would most efficiently reduce the risk of epidemic, while requiring the minimum doses of vaccines as compared to other vaccination strategies. Our theoretical framework can be applied to other future sport tournaments too.
Highlights
The European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control reported a measles outbreak in Ukraine with more than 11,000 cases from the beginning of 2012 until the end of June 2012 [1, 2]
We introduce a discrete time Markov chain model, which is an adaptation of a multitype Galton-Watson process with immigration to give a mathematical model for the evolution of the epidemic
We define a discrete time Markov chain model, which is an adaptation of a multitype Galton-Watson process with immigration
Summary
The European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control reported a measles outbreak in Ukraine with more than 11,000 cases from the beginning of 2012 until the end of June 2012 [1, 2]. The 2012 UEFA European Championship (Euro 2012) took place in Ukraine and Poland between 8 June and 1 July 2012, attracting several hundreds of thousands of football fans to these countries [3]. We calculate the risk of epidemics connected to sports-related mass gathering events. We apply our model to the special case of measles epidemics in Ukraine during the Euro 2012. The suboptimal measles vaccination coverage in many European countries poses a risk of measles epidemics caused by fans returning from Euro 2012. We study the impact of different outcomes of Euro 2012 on the probability of post-tournament measles epidemics in International Journal of Stochastic Analysis the participating countries and compare the effectiveness of different vaccination strategies by target host in reducing the risk of imported epidemics in other countries after Euro 2012. We close with a discussion on the applicability of our model for other sports-related mass gathering events. In the appendix we calculate explicitly the expected number and the variance of infectious cases imported to the home country by supporters
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