%L discovery10176045
%K Science & Technology, Life Sciences & Biomedicine, Immunology, Infectious Diseases, Microbiology, depletion of susceptibles, heavy-tailed network, herd immunity, men who have sex with men, mpox
%J The Journal of Infectious Diseases
%I OXFORD UNIV PRESS INC
%O © The Author(s) 2023. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of Infectious Diseases Society of America.
This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted reuse, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
%X Many countries affected by the global outbreak of mpox in 2022 have observed a decline in cases. Our mathematical model accounting for heavy-tailed sexual partnership distributions suggests that mpox epidemics can hit the infection-derived herd immunity threshold and begin to decline with less than 1% of sexually active MSM population infected regardless of interventions or behavioural changes. Consistently, we found that many countries and US states experienced an epidemic peak with cumulative cases of around 0.1-0.5% of MSM population. The observed decline in cases may not necessarily be attributable to interventions or behavioural changes primarily.
%C United States
%A Hiroaki Murayama
%A Carl AB Pearson
%A Sam Abbott
%A Fuminari Miura
%A Sung-mok Jung
%A Elizabeth Fearon
%A Sebastian Funk
%A Akira Endo
%T Accumulation of Immunity in Heavy-Tailed Sexual Contact Networks Shapes Mpox Outbreak Sizes
%D 2023