Computational modeling of the immune response to yellow fever

Yellow fever (YF) is an infectious disease caused by a type of virus called flavivirus. According to the World Health Organization (WHO), 44 countries are endemics, and around 200,000 cases of YF are recorded per year causing 30,000 deaths, mainly in Africa and South America. For this reason, it is very important to understand the behavior of the disease and the associated immune response in order to design better strategies for treating it. To this end, this study describes a mathematical model to represent the human immune response to an infection by YF virus. For the best of our knowledge, this is the first mathematical model of the effects of the YF in the immune system. This is the beginning of a path that will allow us to verify, for example, if a booster dose of YF vaccine is really necessary every 10 years and if a lower dosage could be used to achieve similar protection.