Modeling the Heterogeneity of Dengue Transmission in a City

Abstract

Dengue fever is one of the most important vector-borne diseases in the world, and modeling its transmission dynamics allows for determining the key influence factors and helps to perform interventions. The heterogeneity of mosquito bites of humans during the spread of dengue virus is an important factor that should be considered when modeling the dynamics. However, traditional models generally assumed homogeneous mixing between humans and vectors, which is inconsistent with reality. In this study, we proposed a compartmental model with negative binomial distribution transmission terms to model this heterogeneity at the population level. By including the aquatic stage of mosquitoes and incorporating the impacts of the environment and climate factors, an extended model was used to simulate the 2014 dengue outbreak in Guangzhou, China, and to simulate the spread of dengue in different scenarios. The results showed that a high level of heterogeneity can result in a small peak size in an outbreak. As the level of heterogeneity decreases, the transmission dynamics approximate the dynamics predicted by the corresponding homogeneous mixing model. The simulation results from different scenarios showed that performing interventions early and decreasing the carrying capacity for mosquitoes are necessary for preventing and controlling dengue epidemics. This study contributes to a better understanding of the impact of heterogeneity during the spread of dengue virus.

Assessing the interplay between human mobility and mosquito borne diseases in urban environments

“…We study the influence of human mobility on the spread of the mosquito-borne dengue virus, as inferred from a large-scale mobile communication dataset in the city-state of Singapore. Contrary to previous studies that either focused on this problem at the scale of countries or regions 2,[9][10][11][12][13][14] , essentially treating cities as well-mixed nodes in a larger travel network, or used small-scale data of human movement inside cities collected through surveys 15 or only use theoretical models and aggregate on intra-city human mobility [16][17][18][19][20] , we now employ a large-scale dataset of human mobility to study the connection between intra-city mobility and dengue spread. We focus on comparing a dengue transmission model based on people's real commuting patterns (as inferred from the mobile phone dataset) with the observed dengue cases and with simulations employing random mobility models.…”

“…Considering the threat presented by dengue especially in cities, many authors studied the effect of dengue fever in urban environments 7,11,[17][18][19][20] . While these work generally assume that intra-city mobility is an important factor for dengue epidemics, a direct quantification of this effect is still lacking.…”

Complexity and critical thresholds in the dynamics of visceral leishmaniasis

“…Uniform homogeneous biting is recovered in equation (2.5) (also see electronic supplementary material, Document) for large values of k j , the biting heterogeneity parameter in patch j . However, as k j gets closer to zero, the degree of heterogeneity in biting increases [ 42 , 43 ]. On the other hand, sandfly vectors may have different feeding preferences for humans and reservoirs A and B .…”

New and Enhanced Tools for Civil Military Operations (NET-CMO)

“…To address this shortcoming, Kong et al (2018) modeled the interactions of mosquito and humans to be a random variable, with some humans more likely to interact with mosquitoes than others (Kong et al 2018). They derived the exposure rate to have the form…”