The interplay of vaccination and vector control on small dengue networks

Abstract

Dengue fever is a major public health issue affecting billions of people in over 100 countries across the globe. This challenge is growing as the invasive mosquito vectors, Aedes aegypti and Aedes albopictus, expand their distributions and increase their population sizes. Hence there is an increasing need to devise effective control methods that can contain dengue outbreaks. Here we construct an epidemiological model for virus transmission between vectors and hosts on a network of host populations distributed among city and town patches, and investigate disease control through vaccination and vector control using variants of the sterile insect technique (SIT). Analysis of the basic reproductive number and simulations indicate that host movement across this small network influences the severity of epidemics. Both vaccination and vector control strategies are investigated as methods of disease containment and our results indicate that these controls can be made more effective with mixed strategy solutions. We predict that reduced lethality through poor SIT methods or imperfectly efficacious vaccines will impact efforts to control disease spread. In particular, weakly efficacious vaccination strategies against multiple virus serotype diversity may be counter productive to disease control efforts. Even so, failings of one method may be mitigated by supplementing it with an alternative control strategy. Generally, our network approach encourages decision making to consider connected populations, to emphasise that successful control methods must effectively suppress dengue epidemics at this landscape scale.

Optimal control of malaria: combining vector interventions and drug therapies

“…While it is difficult to parameterize a model of mosquito movement (though values between 4– migration between neighbouring villages are reported in [ 63 ]), the spatial ecology of A. gambiae will undoubtedly be crucial in determining the spread or containment of control efforts. The network model proposed here could be improved by including human movement [ 64 ] as a means to spread infection. Using the optimal control framework in such a model would require reformulating cost functions capable of capturing heterogeneous populations, which is beyond the scope of this study.…”

Dengue Reemergence: The Challenges Ahead

“…They are starting to show promising results. Predictive models have shown that weakly efficacious vaccination strategies against multiple virus serotype diversity can be counter-productive to disease control efforts [55], [60].…”

Effect of daily human movement on some characteristics of dengue dynamics

“…In particular, ordinary differential equations have been used to model the human mobility between two or more locations [9]. One approach is the continuous moving of the human population between places [10][11][12][13][14][15]. Other proposal is the residence time, which represents the proportion of time that human budget their residence across regions [16][17][18][19].…”