Linking Immuno-Epidemiology Principles to Violence

Background Societies have always struggled with violence, but recently there has been a push to understand violence as a public health issue. This idea has unified professionals in medicine, epidemiological, and psychology with a goal to end violence and heal those exposed to it. Recently, analogies...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:BMC public health Vol. 22; no. 1; pp. 1 - 8
Main Authors: Sisk, Anna, Bamwine, Patricia, Day, Judy, Fefferman, Nina
Format: Journal Article
Language:English
Published: London BioMed Central 18.11.2022
BioMed Central Ltd
Springer Nature B.V
BMC
Subjects:
Aggression
Analogies
Biostatistics
Child & adolescent mental health
Community organizations
Community structure
Contact tracing
Disease
Disease prevention
Domestic violence
Environmental Health
Epidemics
Epidemiology
Exposure
Forecasts and trends
Health aspects
Immune system
Infectious diseases
Intervention
Mathematical analysis
Mathematical model
Mathematical models
Medicine
Medicine & Public Health
Mental health
Murders & murder attempts
Organizational effectiveness
Prevention
Prevention programs
Principals
Protective factors
Psychology
Public buildings
Public Health
Sex crimes
Simulation
Suicides & suicide attempts
Teenagers
Vaccine
Vaccines
Victimization
Violence
Violence exposure
Young adults
United States
Protective factors
Mathematical model
Public health
Violence exposure
ISSN:1471-2458, 1471-2458
Online Access:Get full text
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Summary:Background Societies have always struggled with violence, but recently there has been a push to understand violence as a public health issue. This idea has unified professionals in medicine, epidemiological, and psychology with a goal to end violence and heal those exposed to it. Recently, analogies have been made between community-level infectious disease epidemiology and how violence spreads within a community. Experts in public health and medicine suggest an epidemiological framework could be used to study violence. Methods Building upon results from community organizations which implement public health-like techniques to stop violence spread, we look to formalize the analogies between violence and infectious diseases. Then expanding on these ideas and using mathematical epidemiological principals, we formulate a susceptible-exposed-infected model to capture violence spread. Further, we ran example numerical simulations to show how a mathematical model can provide insight on prevention strategies. Results The preliminary simulations show negative effects of violence exposure have a greater impact than positive effects of preventative measures. For example, our simulation shows that when the impact of violence exposure is reduced by half, the amount of violence in a community drastically decreases in the long-term; but to reach this same outcome through an increase in the amount of after exposure support, it must be approximately fivefold. Further, we note that our simulations qualitatively agree with empirical studies. Conclusions Having a mathematical model can give insights on the effectiveness of different strategies for violence prevention. Based on our example simulations, the most effective use of community funding is investing in protective factors, instead of support after violence exposure, but of course these results do not stand in isolation and will need to be contextualized with the rest of the research in the field.
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ISSN:1471-2458
1471-2458
DOI:10.1186/s12889-022-14472-3