Abstract
Tuberculosis (TB), an air-borne infectious disease, is a major public-health problem in China. The reported number of the active tuberculosis cases is about one million each year. The morbidity data for 2005–2012 reflect that the difference in morbidity based on age group is significant, thus the role of age-structure on the transmission of TB needs to be further developed. In this work, based on the reported data and the observed morbidity characteristics, we propose a susceptible-exposed-infectious-recovered (SEIR) epidemic model with age groupings, involving three categories: children, the middle-aged, and senior to investigate the role of age on the transmission of tuberculosis in Mainland China from 2005 to 2016. Then, we evaluated the parameters by the Least Square method and simulated the model and it had good alignment with the reported infected TB data in Mainland China. Furthermore, we estimated the basic reproduction number of , with an obtained 95% confidence interval for of by Latin hypercube sampling, and we completed a sensitivity analysis of in terms of some parameters. Our study demonstrates that diverse age groups have different effects on TB. Two effective measures were found that would help reach the goals of the World Health Organization (WHO) End TB Strategy: an increase in the recovery rate and the reduction in the infectious rate of the senior age group.
Highlights
Tuberculosis (TB) is an air-borne infective disease caused by the slowly-replicating bacteriumMycobacterium tuberculosis (Mtb)
Person-to-person transmission of Mtb occurs via the respiratory system, which can happen through both close contact between people and through infectious bacilli being carried throughout buildings by air currents [1]
The basic reproduction number of an infection can be viewed as the number of cases one case generates on average over the course of its infectious period [28]
Summary
Tuberculosis (TB) is an air-borne infective disease caused by the slowly-replicating bacterium. Few works have used mathematical models with age groupings to study the transmission of TB in China. In this paper, based on the reported data and the observed morbidity characteristics, we created a susceptible-exposed-infectious-recovered (SEIR) model with age groups of childhood, middle-aged, and senior, to investigate the role of age on the transmission process and evaluate feasible control strategies to reach the goals outlined in the WHO End TB Strategy. We estimated the basic reproduction number R0 , analyzed the globally dynamic behavior of the model, and used the model to simulate the annual data of infected TB cases reported by the Center for Disease.
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