However, determining the individual probabilities can be cumbersome, especially if multiple states are involved. For a vector-borne infection such as malaria, with two infection states (human and mosquito), calculating the first probability involves determining the probability that a human infected at time 0 exists at time t, the probability that a human infected for total time t infects a mosquito and the probability that an infected mosquito lives to be age a − t, where 0 ≤ t ≤ a [2] . For diseases with more states, such as Guinea Worm disease, where there is a waterborne parasite, which can attach itself to copepods, which in turn are ingested by humans and which subsequently grow into an internal nematode, the calculations of the survival probabilities become unwieldy.