Schistosomiasis is a neglected tropical disease affecting communities surrounded by water bodies where fishing activities take place or people go to swim, wash and cultivate crops. It poses a great risk to the health and economic life of inhabitants of the area. This study was carried out to evaluate the impact of public health education and snail control measures on the incidence of schistosomiasis. A model was developed with attention given to the snail and human populations that are the hosts of the cercariae and miracidia respectively. The existence and stability of disease-free and endemic equilibrium states were established. The disease-free and endemic equilibrium states were shown to be locally asymptotically stable whenever the basic reproduction number was less than unity. Numerical simulations of the model were carried out to evaluate the impact of interventions (public health education and snail control measures) on schistosomiasis transmission. It was observed that the implementation of low coverage snail control with highly efficacious molluscicide and massive public health education will make the basic reproduction number smaller than unity, which implies the eradication of schistosomiasis in the population.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.