Responsive immunization and intervention for infectious diseases in social networks

By using the microscopic Markov-chain approximation approach, we investigate the epidemic spreading and the responsive immunization in social networks. It is assumed that individual vaccination behavior depends on the local information of an epidemic. Our results suggest that the responsive immunization has negligible impact on the epidemic threshold and the critical value of initial epidemic outbreak, but it can effectively inhibit the outbreak of epidemic. We also analyze the influence of the intervention on the disease dynamics, where the vaccination is available only to those individuals whose number of neighbors is greater than a certain value. Simulation analysis implies that the intervention strategy can effectively reduce the vaccine use under the epidemic control. (C) 2014 AIP Publishing LLC.