@misc{10481/31127,
year = {2011},
url = {http://hdl.handle.net/10481/31127},
abstract = {Some epidemics have been empirically observed to exhibit outbreaks of all possible sizes, i.e., to be scale-free or scale-invariant. Different explanations for this finding have been put forward; among them there is a model for “accidental pathogens” which leads to power-law distributed outbreaks without apparent need of parameter fine tuning. This model has been claimed to be related to self-organized criticality, and its critical properties have been conjectured to be related to directed percolation. Instead, we show that this is a (quasi) neutral model, analogous to those used in Population Genetics and Ecology, with the same critical behavior as the voter-model, i.e. the theory of accidental pathogens is a (quasi)-neutral theory. This analogy allows us to explain all the system phenomenology, including generic scale invariance and the associated scaling exponents, in a parsimonious and simple way.},
organization = {The authors acknowledge financial support from the Spanish MICINN-FEDER under project FIS2009-08451, from Junta de Andalucía Proyecto de Excelencia P09FQM-4682, and from the Acción Integrada Hispano-Argentina, MICINN AR2009-0003.},
publisher = {Public Library of Science (PLOS)},
keywords = {Bacterial pathogens},
keywords = {Epidemiological statics},
keywords = {Measles},
keywords = {Meningitis},
keywords = {Mutation},
keywords = {Neutral theory},
keywords = {Pathogens},
keywords = {Percolation},
title = {Quasi-Neutral Theory of Epidemic Outbreaks},
author = {Pinto, Oscar A. and Muñoz Martínez, Miguel Ángel},
}