Impact of birth seasonality on dynamics of acute immunizing infections in Sub-Saharan africa

The researchers analyze the impact of birth seasonality (seasonal oscillations in the birth rate) on the dynamics of acute, immunizing childhood infectious diseases. Previous research has explored the effect of human birth seasonality on infectious disease dynamics using parameters appropriate for the developed world. They build on this work by including in their analysis an extended range of baseline birth rates and amplitudes, which correspond to developing world settings. Additionally, their analysis accounts for seasonal forcing both in births and contact rates. They focus in particular on the dynamics of measles. In the absence of seasonal transmission rates or stochastic forcing, for typical measles epidemiological parameters, birth seasonality induces either annual or biennial epidemics. Changes in the magnitude of the birth fluctuations (birth amplitude) can induce significant changes in the size of the epidemic peaks, but have little impact on timing of disease epidemics within the year. In contrast,