The purpose of this paper is to give some very simple applications of martingales to epidemics. The results are all connected with stopping times T (for instance the classical end of epidemic) and include the expression of the joint generating function Laplace transform of and and simple relations between moments of these three variables. (Here Xt and Yt respectively denote the numbers of susceptibles and carriers.) We also give several relations between different types of epidemics. Although this paper only deals with Downton's model, some of the methods are still valid for more general models.

We establish a sufficient condition for which the expected area under the trajectory of the carrier process is directly proportional to the expected number of removed carriers in the class of carrier-borne, right-shift, epidemic models studied by Severo (1969a). This result generalizes the previous work of Downton (1972) and Jerwood (1974) for some special cases of these models. We use the result to compute expected costs in the carrier-borne model due to Downton (1968) when it is unlikely that all the susceptibles will be infected. We conclude by showing that for the special case considered by Weiss (1965) this treatment of the expected cost is reasonable for populations with a large initial number of susceptibles.

In this paper, the cost of the carrier-borne epidemic is considered. The definition of duration, as used by Weiss (1965) and subsequent authors, is generalised and the probability distribution for the number of located carriers is obtained. One component of cost, namely the area generated by the trajectory of carriers, is examined and its probability density function derived. The expected area generated is then shown to be proportional to the expected number of carriers located during the epidemic, a result which has an analogue in the general stochastic epidemic.