Infectious Disease Modelling conference 2024
Published:
I participated in Infectious Disease Modelling conference 2024 in Bangkok, Thailand (5-8 Nov 2024). It was a great honour to present our work on mpox clade I at Early Career Researcher session (oral). This was my first time attending an academic conference and presenting my work, and I am extremely grateful for the opportunity. I was absolutely thrilled to connect with brilliant people from around the globe.
You can download a PDF copy of my presentation slide below or here. For more details on my talk, see our latest preprint (doi:10.1101/2024.10.15.243155544).
Presentation summary
I gave an oral presentation about transmission dynamics and risk assessment of mpox clade IIb and Ib within men who have sex with men.
Mpox has two main clades, I and II. Clade IIb predominantly affected MSM communities in 2022, with an initial surge in cases followed by a sharp decline, likely due to the depletion of high-risk susceptible individuals, behavioural changes and interventions. Clade Ib emerged in 2024 in the DRC, with transmission driven by community and sexual contacts, notably involving female sex workers. Our work aimed to get a better understanding of whether clade Ib could impact MSM communities previously affected by clade IIb, using a mathematical model to assess clade I’s outbreak risk.
Our previous work, published in The Journal of Infectious Diseases (doi:10.1093/infdis/jiad254), showed that for clade IIb, the outbreaks peaked at 0.3-0.5% of MSM populations across countries, and the rapid decline in cases would have been likely driven by accumulation of infection-derived immunity (please also check the archived tweetrial for our previous study). Using this clade IIb model, we derived the basic reproduction number (R0) for clade I, relative to clade IIb’s R0, to determine the conditions required for clade I to initiate an outbreak. Our results showed clade I would require an R0 of 3-8 to trigger an outbreak within MSM that experienced clade IIb 2022 outbreaks even without accounting for vaccination, but the current R0 estimate for clade Ib (~1.5) falls short. With 50% vaccine coverage, the required R0 rises to at least 6.
Our model indicates that Clade Ib may be unlikely to cause outbreaks in previously affected MSM populations. Our findings also suggest that vaccination would play a crucial role in lowering outbreak risks.
