Spatial spread of Dengue with human and vector mobility in urban areas

Abstract

Dengue is a vector borne disease transmitted to Humans by Aedes Aegypti mosquitoes carrying Dengue virus serotypes. Dengue is endemic in tropical countries and about 2.5 billion people around the world are at the risk of it. In the last two decades increasing attention has been paid to mathematical and computational modeling spread of Dengue. Primarily an urban epidemic, Dengue exhibits complex spatial and temporal dynamics. However, most of the existing ODE based models of Dengue spread neglect the spatial nature of the spreading of Dengue. Motivated by a recent work (L. C. Medeiros et al, 2011), we model the host-vector-environment interactions through Cellular Automata framework and analyze the spreading of the disease on a large spatial grid using parameters from field studies and data based models of human mobility (super diffusive levy flight) and vector mobility (diffusive). We also formulate corresponding non-linear reaction-diffusion equations (RD) for spatial spread. We show a close match between the CA and RD models for the case without human mobility. This work sheds light on how Dengue parameters and human mobility changes the spatial spread of the infection and size of the epidemic.