The Need for More Integrated Epidemic Modeling with Emphasis on Antibiotic Resistance

Antibiotic resistance has become one of the greatest threats to public and patient health. This chapter examines the history of mathematical modeling of infectious diseases and a selection of its achievements and limitations. It is followed by a discussion of the need to develop models of disease spread that incorporate individual behavior with reference to how this can improve models of bacterial pathogens. As the global epidemic of antibiotic resistance has increased in recent years, mathematical models of the spread of antibiotic resistance have also been developed. Over the past several decades, significant advances have been made in understanding disease transmission, individual behavior, and social structures. For instance, one of the biggest advances in the area of epidemic modeling is use of Bayesian inference in conjunction with Markov chain Monte Carlo methods to impute unobserved data.