Modeling the effect of information campaigns on the HIV epidemic in Uganda

Abstract

The increasing prevalence of HIV/AIDS in Africa over the past twenty-five years continues to erode the continent's health care and overall welfare. There have been various responses to the pandemic, led by Uganda, which has had the greatest success in combating the disease. Part of Uganda's success has been attributed to a formalized information, education, and communication (IEC) strategy, lowering estimated HIV/AIDS infection rates from 18.5% in 1995 to 4.1% in 2003. We formulate a model to investigate the effects of information and education campaigns on the HIV epidemic in Uganda. These campaigns affect people's behavior and can divide the susceptibles class into subclasses with different infectivity rates. Our model is a system of ordinary differential equations and we use data about the epidemics and the number of organizations involved in the campaigns to estimate the model parameters. We compare our model with three types of susceptibles to a standard SIR model.

Dynamics of an Infectious Disease Where Media Coverage Influences Transmission

“…One concern is that data on media coverage is hard to gather and in most cases when available are limited. As noted in [30], refining the susceptible class based on behavior change and including the dynamics of the information level are valid features. Finding data and including other features to make the proposed model more realistic are therefore very important if the model is to be calibrated to real data for comparison.…”

“…Also, news reporting at rates dependent upon the number of cases and the rate of change in cases may not destabilize an endemic steady-state, but it can significantly reduce prevalence. For instance, part of Uganda's success has been attributed to a formalized information, education, and communication strategy, lowering estimated HIV/AIDS infection rates from 18.5% in 1995 to 4.1% in 2003 [30]. Vigorous media reporting can have a substantial effect on reducing the impact of an outbreak as public health agencies constant updating of the media about the number of infections as they immediately pass on the information to the general population could result is a dramatic decrease in the severity of the outbreak, see Figure 4.…”

“…Li and Cui [29] analyze the effects of constant and pulse vaccination of a susceptible-infected-vaccinated SIV epidemic models incorporating media coverage. Joshi et al [30] model the effect of information campaigns on the HIV epidemic in Uganda and explicitly include a class reflecting the amount of educational information. Mummert and Weiss [31] examined the situation when the media holds back news of an outbreak and only after some time begins to report the disease morbidity and mortality with two types of delays.…”

A SICA compartmental model in epidemiology with application to HIV/AIDS in Cape Verde

“…Several mathematical models have been proposed for HIV/AIDS transmission dynamics: see, e.g., [1,2,3,5,6,9,10,12,13,17,18] and references cited therein.…”

Optimal Control Analysis of an SIR Epidemic Model with Constant recruitment

“…Mathematical models have become important tools in analyzing the spread and control of infectious diseases. Some examples on the use of mathematical model for the analyzes of treatment and control of infectious disease can be found in [11,13,16,17,21,27,28], etc. For instance, [13], based on results from the analysis and simulations of their HIV model, suggested universal HIV testing followed by an immediate commencement of antiretroviral therapy for those infected as a strategy to drive HIV epidemic towards elimination.…”