Agent-Based Modelling of Mpox Infection Dynamics: Simulating Disease Transmission and Control Strategies

Mpox is a viral disease caused by the monkey pox virus (MPXV) of the Poxviridae family. It is similar to smallpox and cowpox. Mpox is not categorized as a sexually transmitted infection, however, most transmission in the recent global outbreak has been attributed to be through men who have sex with men (MSM). Agent-based modelling (ABM) is an effective approach to simulate the spread of Mpox because it enables the detailed representation of heterogeneity among individuals or sub-populations, including variations in behaviour, susceptibility to disease, and contact patterns. This is crucial for accurately modelling diseases in populations with long tailed distributions of characteristics such as sexual activity, that has been seen in the recent Mpox outbreak. Two ABMs are presented in this paper which simulate the spread of Mpox in an artificial population. The parameters for contact formation and dissolution are drawn from the NATSAL-3 dataset (National Survey of Sexual Attitudes and Lifestyles) (Mercer et al. 2013). The presented ABMs are based on the principles of the classic compartmental Susceptible-Exposed-Infected-Recovered (SEIR) model and complexity is further added to break the assumptions of homogeneous mixing and populations. The first ABM is based on an heterogeneous population, consisting of people from two self-identified genders (male and female) and three sexual preferences: homosexual, bi-sexual and heterosexual. The second ABM is a subset of the first ABM, that focuses on the MSM population, which is considered to be at high-risk of Mpox. We report a set of experiments modelling relevant scenarios by number of imported cases, number of super-spreader events, and different vaccination strategies. Our analysis concludes that Mpox infection reaches locally stable disease-free equilibrium in the absence of concurrent partnerships. Our simulations demonstrate that prioritizing vaccines for the MSM population can significantly reduce the effective R value from 1.62 to 0.19, highlighting the potential impact of targeted vaccination strategies in mitigating Mpox transmission.