| Summary: | From the first recorded influenza pandemic in 1890, there have been new strains of influenza which have caused pandemics approximately every 30 years including recent events such as the H5N1 Avian 'Flu pandemic and the 2009 H1N1 Swine 'Flu pandemic. Although the 2009 pandemic was mild in nature, if events of the past are any indication then control of future pandemics is of utmost importance. Vaccination is commonly looked at to help control the spread of a pandemic, however, vaccinations are strain-specific. While developing a new vaccine is possible, the World Health Organisation estimates that this process would take four to five months. This means that vaccination cannot be used to help control the spread of influenza early on in a pandemic. An alternative are antivirals which are not strain-specific, meaning that they can potentially be used to help control the spread of influenza early on in a pandemic. Antivirals are, however, not as effective at reducing the spread of disease when compared to vaccination. In the 2009 Swine 'Flu pandemic, many countries worldwide utilised antiviral medication, with the aim to assist in controlling the spread of influenza. The most common method in which these antivirals were utilised we refer to as dynamic allocation. In dynamic allocation, when the first person in a household experiences influenza-like symptoms, they report to a health professional. Then, a sample is sent for laboratory testing. If the individual is confirmed to have influenza, the entire household is allocated a course of antivirals and every member of the household begins taking them. The potential weakness in this strategy is the delay between becoming infectious and a household receiving antivirals. We consider an alternative antiviral allocation scheme which we call preallocation. In a preallocation scheme, instead of waiting for antivirals to be delivered after the first confirmed infection, as is the case with dynamic allocation, the antivirals are delivered to households at the beginning of the ...
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