A Network-Based Meta-Population Approach to Model Rift Valley Fever Epidemics

Details A Network-Based Meta-Population Approach to Model Rift Valley Fever Epidemics A Network-Based Meta-Population Approach to Model Rift Valley Fever Epidemics

2010-12-08

arxiv.org/abs/1012.1684v2

Biology

Quantitative Biology

Other Quantitative Biology

18 pages, 20 figures, 3 tables

Scientific paper

Rift Valley Fever virus (RVFv) has been expanding its geographical distribution with important implications for both human and animal health. The emergence of Rift Valley Fever (RVF) in the Middle East, and its continuing presence in many areas of Africa, has negatively impacted both medical and veterinary morbidity, mortality, and economic endpoints. Furthermore, worldwide attention should be directed towards the broader infection dynamics of RVFv, since suitable host, vector and environmental conditions for additional epidemics likely exist on other continents; including Asia, Europe and the Americas. We extend a compartmentalized ordinary differential equation model of RVF to assess disease spread in both time and in space; with the latter driven as a function of contact networks. Four species are included in the model; namely, humans and livestock hosts, and two species of vector mosquitoes. The model is based on weighted contact networks, where nodes of the networks represent geographical regions and the weights represent the level of contact between regional pairings for each set of species. We have tested, calibrated, and evaluated the model using data from the recent (2010) RVF outbreak in South Africa as case study; mapping the epidemic spread within and among three South African provinces. An extensive set of simulation results shows the potential of the proposed approach for accurately modeling the RVF spreading process in additional regions of the world.

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