quasi-neutral theory of epidemic outbreaksquasi-neutral疫情暴发的理论.pdfVIP

Quasi-Neutral Theory of Epidemic Outbreaks 1,2 ˜ 2 Oscar A. Pinto , Miguel A. Munoz * ´ ´ ´ 1 Departamento de Fısica, Instituto de Fısica Aplicada, Universidad Nacional de San Luis - CONICET, San Luis, Argentina, 2 Departamento de Electromagnetismo y Fısica de ´ ´ la Materia, Facultad de Ciencias, Instituto de Fısica Teorica y Computacional Carlos I, Universidad de Granada, Granada, Spain Abstract Some epidemics have been empirically observed to exhibit outbreaks of all possible sizes, i.e., to be scale-free or scale- invariant. Different explanations for this finding have been put forward; among them there is a model for ‘‘accidental pathogens’’ which leads to power-law distributed outbreaks without apparent need of parameter fine tuning. This model has been claimed to be related to self-organized criticality, and its critical properties have been conjectured to be related to directed percolation. Instead, we show that this is a (quasi) neutral model, analogous to those used in Population Genetics and Ecology, with the same critical behavior as the voter-model, i.e. the theory of accidental pathogens is a (quasi)-neutral theory. This analogy allows us to explain all the system phenomenology, including generic scale invariance and the associated scaling exponents, in a parsimonious and simple way. ˜ Citation: Pinto OA, Munoz MA (2011) Quasi-Neutral Theory of Epidemic Outbreaks. PLoS ONE 6(7): e21946. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0021946 Editor: Michael George Roberts, Massey University, New Zealand Received April 15, 2011; A