Mathematical models can be used to aid in decision making and have been increasingly applied to analyse the potential impact of containment strategies, pharmaceutical interventions and public health measures on the course of a novel influenza pandemic [6] [7] [8] [9] . Before the emergence of the novel influenza A/H1N1, virus modelling studies have suffered from the high number and uncertainty of necessary assumptions [10] . Even during the first months of the pandemic with the novel virus A/H1N1 only limited knowledge has emerged about the characteristics of the new virus [11, 12] . Therefore, we do not stress the particular timing and severity of a certain baseline scenario, but rather concentrate on the effect of the intervention in the model that should allow an estimation of the possible effects of these interventions.