Personal Protective Behaviour During an Epidemic

The TELL ME simulation model is being developed to assist health authorities to understand the effects of their choices about how to communicate with citizens about protecting themselves from influenza epidemics. It will include an agent based model to simulate personal decisions to seek vaccination or adopt behaviour such as improved hand hygiene. This paper focusses on the design of the agents' decisions, using a combination of personal attitude, average local attitude, the local number of influenza cases and the case fatality rate. It also describes how personal decision making is connected to other parts of the model