Multiple effects of self-protection on the spreading of epidemics

Aside from the commonly considered strategies: vaccination or risk, in this work another basic policy self-protection strategy is incorporated into research of epidemics spreading. Then within the network-theoretical framework, we mainly explore the impact of self-protection strategy on the epidemic size and the eradication of infection. Interestingly, we find that the self-protection influence is multiple: given that the effectiveness of the self-protective strategy is negligible, nobody is willing to take up this act, both vaccination and risk traits dominate the whole system; On the contrary, when the effectiveness of self-protective policy is elevated, it becomes a popular strategy and the size of epidemic can be controlled at a relatively low level. However, one worse situation is present as well: when the effectiveness of self-protection is moderate, the infection probability and epidemic size can reach the maximal level. This is because that, under such a case, the emergence of the selfprotective strategy neither inspires the enthusiasm of vaccination nor provides ideal effect. (C) 2014 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.