The European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control called the attention in March 2012 to the risk of measles in Ukraine among visitors to the 2012 UEFA European Football Championship. Large populations of supporters travelled to various locations in Poland and Ukraine, depending on the schedule of Euro 2012 and the outcome of the games, possibly carrying the disease from one location to another. In the present study, we propose a novel two-phase multitype branching process model with immigration to describe the risk of a major epidemic in connection with large-scale sports-related mass gathering events. By analytic means, we calculate the expected number and the variance of imported cases and the probability of a major epidemic caused by the imported cases in their home country. Applying our model to the case study of Euro 2012 we demonstrate that the results of the football games can be highly influential to the risk of measles outbreaks in the home countries of supporters. To prevent imported epidemics, it should be emphasized that vaccinating travellers would most efficiently reduce the risk of epidemic, while requiring the minimum doses of vaccines as compared to other vaccination strategies. Our theoretical framework can be applied to other future sport tournaments too. 1. Introduction The European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control reported a measles outbreak in Ukraine with more than 11,000 cases from the beginning of 2012 until the end of June 2012 [1, 2]. The 2012 UEFA European Championship (Euro 2012) took place in Ukraine and Poland between 8 June and 1 July 2012, attracting several hundreds of thousands of football fans to these countries [3]. Susceptible visitors not only had a high risk of being infected, but also geographically propagating the epidemic to other countries. We introduce a discrete time Markov chain model, which is an adaptation of a multitype Galton-Watson process with immigration to give a mathematical model for the evolution of the epidemic. Thus, we calculate the risk of epidemics connected to sports-related mass gathering events. Our model consists of two parts, the first one describing the spread of the disease during the championship in the host country, while the second part models the spread of the disease by fans returning to their home countries. We apply our model to the special case of measles epidemics in Ukraine during the Euro 2012. Four of the eight host cities of this championship are in Ukraine (Kiev, Kharkiv, Lviv and Donetsk); one of these, Lviv, is situated in the western region where the
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