Micro-Simulations of Infectious Disease using Official Register Data – The Case of Smallpox

To explore the efficacy of four vaccine-based policy strategies (ring vaccination, targeted vaccination, mass vaccination, and pre-vaccination of health care personnel combined with ring vaccination) for controlling smallpox outbreaks in Sweden, disease transmission on a spatially explicit social network was simulated. The mixing network was formed from highcoverage official register data of the entire Swedish population, building on the Swedish Total Population Register, the Swedish Employment Register, and the Geographic Database of Sweden. The largest reduction measured in the number of infections was achieved when combining ring vaccination with a pre-vaccination of health care personnel. In terms of per dose effectiveness, ring vaccination was by far the most effective strategy. While unsurprising, the results can to some extent be adapted to other diseases and environments, including other countries, and the methodology employed can be analysed in its own right. The mixing networks and other intrinsic structures generated with the help of the model could prove useful to a larger class of problems within policy making, for example.