ABSTRACT
The analysis of infectious disease has developed significantly since the seminal publication of Anderson and May. While many basic models for spread of infection have been developed and applied to real data, in general these have been largely applied in the temporal domain only. This chapter focuses on models for disease spread with emphasis on the spatial or geographical dimension. It reviews approaches to infectious disease surveillance. A fundamental feature of this approach is that direct observation of the infection process between individuals should be recorded and hence the modeling of inter-individual transmission is the focus. There are very few examples of epidemics where the complete path of the epidemic process has been observed. Under-ascertainment can be considered a result of censoring, whereby a mechanism prohibits the observation of cases. A common example could be influenza reporting: most cases are not reported to doctors and so go unrecorded.
