Thanks very much. This is about post-infectious hydrocephalus in Africa as an infectious disease epidemic. My only disclosures are research grants and some voluntary positions. It's been about a hundred years since Kermack and McKendrick laid out the basic principles we use today of how susceptible people interact with infected people and either recover or die from an infectious disease. Here's one of their plots from 1927, showing that they can effectively model deaths from plague in Bombay at the turn of the 20th century. We envision, as with the current COVID epidemic, that susceptible and infected people can interact with a positive feedback loop, which is what underlies epidemics, and they either recover or die from an infection. And indeed, this is very clearly seen if we look at the cases in African countries and how those countries interact with each other. But post-infectious hydrocephalus is a little bit different from that. One of the things that we've noted in our work is that it's not clear that it's contagious for the most part among infants. There seems to be a very steady level of infection on top of which there's a modulation of cases with both rainy seasons. So we can take out this loop from infected to susceptible, and this is characterized as an endemic. And we can plot the cases that are infectious in red and the cases that are controls. These are congenital hydrocephalic cases. Infected infants in this study that was recently published are all under three months of age. They typically have calcified abscesses. We did pick up a novel strain of bacteria that's very virulent that seems to dominate these infections. And on a tree of life of related bacteria, this thing looks like a soil bug. And the topography from where most of these cases come from is a plateau that's swampy, and it's a rice-growing region on the banks of Lake Choga and Lake Victoria. So we've extended the susceptible, infectious, and recovered model to include hydrocephalus. And in this SIRH modeling framework, if we incorporate the demographics of both neonatal sepsis and post-infectious hydrocephalus in Uganda, we come up with very sensible steady-state levels that we see all the time and very close to the numbers of deaths from neonatal sepsis and from post-infectious hydrocephalus each year in that country. Well, now that we have a model that seems to emulate what we see, we can bring in some of the tools of optimal control engineering. And indeed, for the resource constraints that we have, we can try to ask how much of a reduction can we achieve by apportioning over time the care and resources we put into prevention and treatment. And it's a large collaborative effort from physicians and scientists in Africa, Europe, and the U.S. And I thank you very much for your attention.

post-infectious hydrocephalus

infectious disease epidemic

susceptible and infected people

endemic

calcified abscesses