{"id":317,"date":"2014-03-02T00:09:43","date_gmt":"2014-03-02T04:09:43","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/jimlund.org\/blog\/?p=317"},"modified":"2014-03-02T00:09:43","modified_gmt":"2014-03-02T04:09:43","slug":"new-public-health-measures","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/jimlund.org\/blog\/?p=317","title":{"rendered":"New public health measures"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Could new measures substantially improve public health?  <\/p>\n<p>What would be the effect if, say, 90% of the country wore filter masks for one week, and concentrated on washing hands?  <\/p>\n<p>Infection is a chain, one individual infects one or more others, and an infection gets passed on.  That is how disease persists&#8211;for most infectious agents, not in one person for months on end, but passed serially every few months as an individual gets infected, and over a few weeks mounts an immune response and fights it off.<\/p>\n<p>An infectious agent requires a <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Basic_reproduction_number\">basic reproduction factor, an R<sub>0<\/sub><\/a>, of more than one.  If R<sub>0<\/sub> &gt; 1, an infection is growing more common, if R<sub>0<\/sub> &lt; 1, an infection is disappearing.  For more diseases, for infection to persist it must spread.<\/p>\n<p>Currently there are constant but weak efforts to reduce the spread of infection&#8211;encouraging the sick to stay home and hand washing.  Vaccines for influenza.  But what if a serious effort was made?  A big effort could not be sustained, at least not in the US culture.<\/p>\n<p>But what would be the effect of a large, short effort?  If infection transmission can be stomped down for a short period, but long enough to break the chain of infection, it might have a large effect on public health.  I wonder if this has been modeled?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Could new measures substantially improve public health? What would be the effect if, say, 90% of the country wore filter masks for one week, and concentrated on washing hands? Infection is a chain, one individual infects one or more others, and an infection gets passed on. That is how disease persists&#8211;for most infectious agents, not [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9,14],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-317","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-ideas","category-science"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/jimlund.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/317","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/jimlund.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/jimlund.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/jimlund.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/jimlund.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=317"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/jimlund.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/317\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/jimlund.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=317"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/jimlund.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=317"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/jimlund.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=317"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}