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Dear BUGS GROUP, I am a researcher working at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine. I am about to embark on 6 months of development and would appreciate your advice on the suitability of BUGS. I need to build an application that can be used by policy makers in Bangladesh to assess the need for extending vaccination of infants. This will be a discrete-event micro-simulation model i.e. Bangladeshi children are randomly generated in accordance with census data, and are each allocated specific attributes e.g. Gender, Age, Rurality, Immunity etc. They select next events on the basis of the shortest time to the next event i.e. random numbers refer to percentiles in age distributions for different possible events e.g. Infection, Vaccination, Unrelated Death. Transition probabilities then determine the outcome of these events, again using random numbers. The attributes of the infants will have an affect on the path they choose i.e. different transistion probabilities and age distributions for different individuals. The status of these children will change as they pass from event to event, and a 'head count' at specific points in time will determine the total number of Susceptibles, Immune, Dead, Disabled etc. This may only be at the end of the simulation e.g. after 5 years. As all individuals are allocated events at different points in time, these events need to be scheduled into a calendar which deals with each event in date order. A cost accumulator will also be needed, which adds an average cost to the total i.e. when individuals experience events with costs attached to them. Running the model with and without extending vaccination should then provide a comparison based on $ saved per DALY (Disability Adjusted Life Year) averted. Many thanks for your time - any thoughts you have would be greatly appreciated! Best wishes, Andrew Clark ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Andy Clark Health Services Research Unit London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine http://www.lshtm.ac.uk/location/ Tel: +44 (0) 20 7323 9043 Fax: +44 (0) 20 7580 8183 ------------------------------------------------------------------- This list is for discussion of modelling issues and the BUGS software. For help with crashes and error messages, first mail [log in to unmask] To mail the BUGS list, mail to [log in to unmask] Before mailing, please check the archive at www.jiscmail.ac.uk/lists/bugs.html Please do not mail attachments to the list. To leave the BUGS list, send LEAVE BUGS to [log in to unmask] If this fails, mail [log in to unmask], NOT the whole list