Modelling of Infectious Disease with Biomathematics: Implications for Teaching and Research

The chapter compares a variety of models from biomathematics and bioinformatics of the spread of severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) that hit dozens of countries worldwide in 2003. It also investigates students’ and lecturers’ opinions regarding differences in predictions from three different models. All models were based on the real data for Hong Kong published by the World Health Organization (WHO). Although the models were based on the same data, they gave very different predictions of the spread of the disease. The models were discussed with two groups of people: undergraduate students majoring either in engineering or applied mathematics and university lecturers who teach mathematics or mathematical modelling courses. In this chapter we present, analyze, and compare responses to the same questionnaire given to the two groups.