PROBABILITY DISTRIBUTIONS OF INFECTIONS

Abstract

A person infected with malaria may be re-infected before recovering if bitten again by an infectious mosquito. Even third and higher order infections are possible. Here, the best data available consist of panel studies are used for the present study, where blood samples were observed from a fixed set of individuals at discrete points in time. Both Plasmadium vivax and Plasmodium falciparum occur in abundance, but Plasmodium falciparum (the killer parasite) is accounting more as compared to eighties and nineties. Let us consider N subjects and each subject is observed at discrete points of time in the interval (0, T). Let f(x)(x) be the probability function of infections, where X is a discrete random variable, representing the number of infections. Modified negative binomial models give good fit for both of the data sets used compared to Negative and Poisson model in me of both method of moments and maximum likelihood.