Spread of an Infectious Disease

Last spring it was SARS.This winter it's the flu. In the spring it's SARS again and the avian flu.The spread of AIDS has been in the news for the last 15 years.

Every year students read articles in the news or see programs on television about the spread of some infectious disease. Since many modern curricula teach students to model with iterative or recursive equations, and modern calculators will generate sequences of values for these equations, modeling the spread of an infectious disease is an important and interesting project for students at both the Precalculus and Calculus levels.