Heavy-tailed sexual contact networks and the epidemiology of monkeypox outbreak in non-endemic regions, May 2022
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract A global outbreak of monkeypox across non-endemic regions including Europe and North America was confirmed in May 2022. The current outbreak has shown distinct epidemiological features compared with past outbreaks in non-endemic settings, most notably its observed rapid growth and predominant spread among men who have sex with men (MSM). We use a branching process transmission model fitted to empirical sexual partnership data in the UK to show that the heavy-tailed nature of the sexual partnership degree distribution, where a small fraction of individuals have disproportionately large numbers of partners, can explain the sustained growth of monkeypox cases among the MSM population despite the absence of such patterns of spread in past outbreaks. We also suggest that the basic reproduction number ( R 0 ) for monkeypox over the MSM sexual contact network may be substantially greater than 1 for a plausible range of assumptions, which poses a challenge to outbreak containment efforts. Ensuring ongoing support and tailored public health messaging to facilitate prevention and early detection among MSM with a large number of sexual partners is warranted.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.005 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".