THE EFFECTS OF HUMAN MOBILITY ON DENGUE TRANSMISSION DYNAMICS; TWO PATCH MODELS WITH SEASONALITY

Abstract

In recent decades, dengue fever has become a substantial public health concern in many subtropical and tropical countries throughout the world. Many of these regions have strong seasonal patterns which are directly linked to the dengue transmission dynamics. We considered a seasonally forced two-patch dengue model to analyze the long-term dynamics of dengue in heterogeneous environments. The two-patch system models the movement of individuals between and within patches/environments using residence-time matrices for the relative residence time between the patches, under the assumption that only the human budgets their residence time across regions. We considered both constant and effective-population dependent human movement rates in order to investigate the effects of host mobility on dengue transmission dynamics. We also used optimal control theory to identify and evaluate patch-specific control measures aimed at reducing dengue prevalence in the presence of seasonality.