Critical Spatial Clusters for Vaccine Preventable Diseases.

The standard public health intervention for controlling the spread of highly contagious diseases, such as measles, is to vaccinate a large fraction of the population. However, it has been shown that in some parts of the United States, even though the average vaccination rate is high, geographical clusters of undervaccinated populations are emerging. Given that public health resources for response are limited, identifying and rank-ordering clusters can help prioritize and allocate scarce resources for surveillance and quick intervention. We quantify the criticality of a cluster as the additional number of infections caused if the immunization rate in a cluster reduces. This notion of criticality has not been studied before, and, based on clusters identified in prior research, we show that the current underimmunization rate in the cluster, and its criticality are not correlated. We apply our methods to a population model for the state of Minnesota, where we find undervaccinated clusters with significantly higher criticality than those obtained by other natural heuristics.