Role of Vaccination Strategies to Host-Pathogen Dynamics in Social Interactions.

This study presents extended Immunity Agent-Based Model (IABM) simulations to evaluate vaccination strategies in controlling the spread of infectious diseases. The application of IABM in the analysis of vaccination configurations is innovative, as a vaccinated individual can be infected depending on how their immune system acts against the invading pathogen, without a pre-established infection rate. Analysis at the microscopic level demonstrates the impact of vaccination on individual immune responses and infection outcomes, providing a more realistic representation of how the humoral response caused by vaccination affects the individual's immune defense.

The advantage of being slow: The quasi-neutral contact process.

According to the competitive exclusion principle, in a finite ecosystem, extinction occurs naturally when two or more species compete for the same resources. An important question that arises is: when coexistence is not possible, which mechanisms confer an advantage to a given species against the other(s)? In general, it is expected that the species with the higher reproductive/death ratio will win the competition, but other mechanisms, such as asymmetry in interspecific competition or unequal diffusion rates, have been found to change this scenario dramatically. In this work, we examine competitive advantage in the context of quasi-neutral population models, including stochastic models with spatial structure as well as macroscopic (mean-field) descriptions.

Phase diagram of the symbiotic two-species contact process.

We study the two-species symbiotic contact process, recently proposed by de Oliveira, Santos, and Dickman [Phys. Rev. E 86, 011121 (2012)].

Symbiotic two-species contact process.

We study a contact process (CP) with two species that interact in a symbiotic manner. In our model, each site of a lattice may be vacant or host individuals of species A and/or B; multiple occupancy by the same species is prohibited. Symbiosis is represented by a reduced death rate μ<1 for individuals at sites with both species present.

Orthodontic treatment of a patient with Lowe syndrome.

This article describes the orthodontic treatment of a patient with Lowe syndrome. The objective of the treatment was to improve the patient's dental relationships and consequently his quality of life. This was achieved by maxillary expansion and extraction of the mandibular central incisors and maxillary deciduous canines.

Contact process with sublattice symmetry breaking.

We study a contact process with creation at first- and second-neighbor sites and inhibition at first neighbors, in the form of an annihilation rate that increases with the number of occupied first neighbors. Mean-field theory predicts three phases: inactive (absorbing), active symmetric, and active asymmetric, the latter exhibiting distinct sublattice densities on a bipartite lattice. These phases are separated by continuous transitions; the phase diagram is re-entrant.

How to simulate the quasistationary state.

For a large class of processes with an absorbing state, statistical properties of the surviving sample attain time-independent values in the quasistationary (QS) regime. We propose a practical simulation method for studying quasistationary properties, based on the equation of motion governing the QS distribution. In applications to the contact process, the method is shown to reproduce exact results (for the process on a complete graph) and known scaling behavior to high precision.