A Mathematical Model of Rift Valley Fever with Human Host

摘要

Rift Valley Fever is a vector-borne disease mainly transmitted by mosquito. To gain some quantitative insights into its dynamics, a deterministic model with mosquito, livestock, and human host is formulated as a system of nonlinear ordinary differential equations and analyzed. The disease threshold R0 is computed and used to investigate the local stability of the equilibria. A sensitivity analysis is performed and the most sensitive model parameters to the measure of initial disease transmission R0 and the endemic equilibrium are determined. Both R0 and the disease prevalence in mosquitoes are more sensitive to the natural mosquito death rate, d_m. The disease prevalence in livestock and humans are more sensitive to livestock and human recruitment rates, Π_l and Π_h, respectively, suggesting isolation of livestock from humans is a viable preventive strategy during an outbreak. Numerical simulations support the analytical results in further exploring theoretically the long-term dynamics of the disease at the population level.