"Using a novel methodology, we were able to estimate the the number of individuals that are at risk of becoming infected within transmission clusters of the Swiss HIV epidemic and found that many of these clusters are characterized by initial rapid infection of most at risk individuals within a cluster, followed by a slowdown of new infections within each cluster," said Leventhal.
This allowed the team, for the first time, to estimate not only HIV transmission and death rates, but also the total susceptible population size within certain transmission groups from viral sequence data. Their model can successfully predict how the number of infected and susceptible individuals will vary over time, giving new insight and predictions into how an ongoing epidemic will continue to develop and help guide future public health intervention strategies.
Source: Eurekalert