title: Controlling emerging infectious diseases like SARS.
abstract: To control emerging infectious diseases like SARS, it is necessary to resort to basic control measures that limit exposures to infectious individuals. These measures include isolating cases at diagnosis, quarantining household members and tracing contacts of diagnosed cases, providing the community with advice on how to reduce exposures, and closing schools. To justify such intervention it is important to understand how well each of these measures helps to limit transmission. In this paper, we determine the effect of a number of different interventions on the effective reproduction number and estimate requirements to achieve elimination of the infectious disease. We find that the strategy of tracing and quarantining contacts of diagnosed cases can be very successful in reducing transmission.
authors.affiliation: National Centre for Epidemiology and Population Health, Australian National University, Canberra, ACT 0200, Australia. niels.becker@anu.edu.au
authors.forename: Niels G
authors.initials: NG
authors.lastname: Becker
authors.forename: Kathryn
authors.initials: K
authors.lastname: Glass
authors.forename: Zhengfeng
authors.initials: Z
authors.lastname: Li
authors.forename: Geoffrey K
authors.initials: GK
authors.lastname: Aldis
mesh_terms: D001315:Australia / Q000453:epidemiology; D002648:Child; D003140:Communicable Disease Control / Q000379:methods*; D004196:Disease Outbreaks / Q000517:prevention & control*; D018562:Disease Transmission, Infectious; D006801:Humans; D008954:Models, Biological; D045473:Severe acute respiratory syndrome-related coronavirus / Q000254:growth & development*; D045169:Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome / Q000453:epidemiology / Q000517:prevention & control* / Q000635:transmission