Author ORCID Identifier

ttps://orcid.org/0009-0005-3820-4695

Document Type

Technical Report

Disciplines

Applied mathematics, Computer Sciences, Behavioural sciences biology, Infectious diseases, Epidemiology

Publication Details

This report detailed the an extended two group structural heterogeneous agent based model of hepatitis c virus transmission among people who inject drugs. The paper arising from this work is in not yet published.

The baseline model (M1) that was extended in this model is described in Ale et al., 2026, https://doi.org/10.21427/810p-ke33

The baseline model (M2) that was extended in this model is described in Ale et al, 2026, https://doi.org/10.21427/6r9q-4928

Abstract

The model described in this ODD is an agent-based model of hepatitis C virus (HCV) transmission among people who inject drugs (PWID). The model incorporates structural heterogeneity through a three-group interaction framework. The syringe-sharing population in the model is divided into core, inner, and outer circle groups representing individuals with high, moderate, and low levels of syringe-sharing interaction intensity, respectively. While the syringe-sharing rate and all epidemiological processes remain identical across agents, the number of daily interaction opportunities differs by agent grouping, capturing variation in structural position within the syringe-sharing network. Interactions are generated dynamically using proximity-based sampling at each timestep (one day), allowing agents to form syringe-sharing interactions based on spatial closeness. Transmission occurs through direct syringe-sharing events, with infection probability determined by accumulated daily exposure to infectious partners. The model tracks transitions between susceptible, chronic infection, treatment, cure, and resistance states, and is calibrated to Irish HCV surveillance data. This model serves to examine how increasing structural heterogeneity in interaction intensity influences epidemic dynamics relative to simpler structural configurations and the homogeneous baseline model.

DOI

https://doi.org/10.21427/j2nj-a920

Funder

Technological University

Creative Commons License

Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-Share Alike 4.0 International License.

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