The usefulness of these methods is likely to be found in predicting and understanding the impact of household targeted infection control measures in an emerging epidemic. This actually covers a wide class of interventions since the household is a central living and administrative unit in most populations. Decisions regarding isolation, quarantine, vaccination and prophylaxis may often be made for entire households. Similarly school and workplace closures as well as restrictions on leisure activity can be thought of as trying to reduce between household transmission. Analytical approaches are also invaluable in calibrating and providing independent checks on more detailed individual based micro-simulations, such as [13, 17, 20] . Some control interventions require more subtle analyses; for example it has been shown that vaccinating whole households is not the most effective strategy for a given vaccine coverage rate, and that alternative strategies such as preferentially vaccinating larger households could be considered [39] .