Managing disease outbreaks: The importance of vector mobility and spatially heterogeneous control

by Jeffery Demers, Sharon Bewick, Folashade Agusto, Kevin A. Caillou ët, William F. Fagan, Suzanne L. Robertson Management strategies for control of vector-borne diseases, for example Zika or dengue, include using larvicide and/or adulticide, either through large-scale application by truck or plane or through door-to-door efforts that require obtaining permission to access private property and spray yards. The efficacy of the latter strategy is highly dependent on the compliance of local residents. Here we develop a model for vector-borne disease transmission between mosquitoes and humans in a neighborhood setting, considering a network of houses connected via nearest-neighbor mosquito movement. We in corporate large-scale application of adulticide via aerial spraying through a uniform increase in vector death rates in all sites, and door-to-door application of larval source reduction and adulticide through a decrease in vector emergence rates and an increase in vector death rates in compliant si tes only, where control efficacies are directly connected to real-world experimentally measurable control parameters, application frequencies, and control costs. To develop mechanistic insight into the influence of vector motion and compliance clustering on disease controllability, we determine the the basic reproduction numberR0 for the system, provide analytic results for the extreme cases of no mosquito movement, infinite hopping rates, and utilize degenerate perturbation theory...
Source: PLoS Computational Biology - Category: Biology Authors: Source Type: research