TY - JOUR
T1 - Systems thinking in combating infectious diseases
AU - Xia, Shang
AU - Zhou, Xiao Nong
AU - LIU, Jiming
N1 - Funding Information:
This work was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (No. 81502858 and No. 81273192). The authors would like to acknowledge support from Hong Kong Research Grants Council (HKBU 12202415). The funders had no role in the study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the paper.
PY - 2017/9/11
Y1 - 2017/9/11
N2 - The transmission of infectious diseases is a dynamic process determined by multiple factors originating from disease pathogens and/or parasites, vector species, and human populations. These factors interact with each other and demonstrate the intrinsic mechanisms of the disease transmission temporally, spatially, and socially. In this article, we provide a comprehensive perspective, named as systems thinking, for investigating disease dynamics and associated impact factors, by means of emphasizing the entirety of a system's components and the complexity of their interrelated behaviors. We further develop the general steps for performing systems approach to tackling infectious diseases in the real-world settings, so as to expand our abilities to understand, predict, and mitigate infectious diseases.
AB - The transmission of infectious diseases is a dynamic process determined by multiple factors originating from disease pathogens and/or parasites, vector species, and human populations. These factors interact with each other and demonstrate the intrinsic mechanisms of the disease transmission temporally, spatially, and socially. In this article, we provide a comprehensive perspective, named as systems thinking, for investigating disease dynamics and associated impact factors, by means of emphasizing the entirety of a system's components and the complexity of their interrelated behaviors. We further develop the general steps for performing systems approach to tackling infectious diseases in the real-world settings, so as to expand our abilities to understand, predict, and mitigate infectious diseases.
KW - Complex systems approach
KW - Infectious disease control
KW - Systems thinking
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85029353679&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1186/s40249-017-0339-6
DO - 10.1186/s40249-017-0339-6
M3 - Journal article
C2 - 28893320
AN - SCOPUS:85029353679
SN - 2095-5162
VL - 6
JO - Infectious Diseases of Poverty
JF - Infectious Diseases of Poverty
IS - 1
M1 - 144
ER -
