| Budget Amount *help |
¥3,400,000 (Direct Cost: ¥3,400,000)
Fiscal Year 2006: ¥900,000 (Direct Cost: ¥900,000)
Fiscal Year 2005: ¥2,500,000 (Direct Cost: ¥2,500,000)
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| Research Abstract |
Though area quarantine has been proposed as one of the best rapid control strategies against pandemic influenza, it is of critical importance to examine the potential effectiveness of various interventions in different settings. This study was aimed at assessing the potential effectiveness of shutting down transportation systems and comparing this with the effectiveness of other measures, such as facility closure and area quarantine. An agent-based model, which explicitly depicts household distributions and family structures of a community populated with 900,000 individuals, was employed for this analysis. The effectiveness of each measure and probabilities of extinction were compared. Shutting down the train system starting at a specified cumulative number of cases appeared to be 2.16% (95% confidence interval (CI) : [1.81, 2.84]) effective, but closing all facilities at the same threshold reduced the number of clinically apparent infections more efficiently (25.6% effective, 95% CI : [25.1, 26.5]). Moreover, if these measures are combined at an early stage of the epidemic (i.e., if we start both measures immediately at the time a cumulative proportion of clinical reports exceeds 1% of the population), it was shown that the shutdown of transportation systems did not have particular influence on the number of cases. However, it was also demonstrated that the shutdown can increase the probability of successful containment by 20% if the transmission probability within trains is high compared to no transmission within trains. Our study implies that area quarantine is more important to effectively reduce the spread of a pandemic, rather than shutting down trains, but that it might be valuable to shut down trains if the transmission probability within the transportation system is extremely high and if the measure is sufficiently cost effective.
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