The dynamics of infectious diseases represents one of the oldest and ri- est areas of mathematical biology. From the classical work of Hamer (1906) and Ross (1911) to the spate of more modern developments associated with Anderson and May, Dietz, Hethcote, Castillo-Chavez and others, the subject has grown dramatically both in volume and in importance. Given the pace of development, the subject has become more and more di?use, and the need to provide a framework for organizing the diversity of mathematical approaches has become clear. Enzo Capasso, who has been a major contributor to the mathematical theory, has done that in the present volume, providing a system for organizing and analyzing a wide range of models, depending on the str- ture of the interaction matrix. The ?rst class, the quasi-monotone or positive feedback systems, can be analyzed e?ectively through the use of comparison theorems, that is the theory of order-preserving dynamical systems; the s- ond, the skew-symmetrizable systems, rely on Lyapunov methods. Capasso develops the general mathematical theory, and considers a broad range of - amples that can be treated within one or the other framework. In so doing, he has provided the ?rst steps towards the uni?cation of the subject, and made an invaluable contribution to the Lecture Notes in Biomathematics. Simon A. Levin Princeton, January 1993 Author’s Preface to Second Printing In the Preface to the First Printing of this volume I wrote: \ . .
Mathematical modelling of communicable diseases has in the past decades been the subject of intense research activity, on the part of both epidemiologists and biomathematicians; nonlinear forces of infection, spatial structure, age structure and other relevant features have been integrated to make the models more and more realistic and useful in prediction and control. The author's perspective in this book is that there is a concrete possibility of classifying most of the available models according to their mathematical structure, so to obtain a solid framework for analysing the behaviour of the modelled epidemic systems. This monograph suggests a possible classification of a large amount of models (bilinear, nonlinear, with or without structure), based on the Lyapunov stability theory and the theory of order preserving dynamical systems. The volume contains an original presentation of many worked out examples and case studies, mainly based on the author's experience, fully integrated with the exposition of the theory. It also contains a revisit of the most recent advances in the modelling of epidemics, including HIV/AIDS. Two appendices have been added for the ease of non-mathematicians. This monograph may be viewed as a research monograph for mathematically-oriented epidemiologists and for applied mathematicians. However, the detailed presentation of the methods make it a self-contained introduction to the mathematical modelling of infectious diseases so that it may also be used as a textbook in advanced courses of mathematical modelling in Biology and Medicine. The long and updated list of references makes this monograph a valuable survey of the subject.
In this second printing of the book the author has corrected all detected misprints, and updated the bibliography items.
