The 2018 IDM Annual Symposium covered a wide range of topics. Multiple talks focused on small area estimation in public health and demography. Other talks discussed access, treatment, and all-cause mortality in child health. Pandemic preparedness, pandemics and big data, and seasonality of pandemic influenza talks were also given.Evolutionary epidemiology talks covered MERS-CoV, polio virus, and influenza. NTD (Neglected Tropic Disease) talks were given on leptospirosis, visceral leishmaniasis, and onchocerciasis.
HIV modeling at the population level (agent-based) was discussed in talks about oral pre-exposure, social sexual network formation, vaccine and evolution, and incidence estimation. Also at the population level, were talks about TB portfolio optimization and estimating TB and HIV mortality rates. Typhoid presentations included spatial and genomic data to identify transmission pathways, environmental surveillance, endemic typhoid in Oceania, and typhoid conjugate vaccines. Malaria in low-transmission settings, including areas in Kenya and Peru, was the subject of several talks.
Modeling tools, technologies, and platforms talks ranged from an overview of IDM software tools, software best-practices, and agent-based modeling to Bayesian history matching and probability generating functions.