Climate-dependent malaria disease transmission model and its analysis

Abstract

Malaria infection continues to be a major problem in many parts of the world including Africa. Environmental variables are known to significantly affect the population dynamics and abundance of insects, major catalysts of vector-borne diseases, but the exact extent and consequences of this sensitivity are not yet well established. To assess the impact of the variability in temperature and rainfall on the transmission dynamics of malaria in a population, we propose a model consisting of a system of non-autonomous deterministic equations that incorporate the effect of both temperature and rainfall to the dispersion and mortality rate of adult mosquitoes. The model has been validated using epidemiological data collected from the western region of Ethiopia by considering the trends for the cases of malaria and the climate variation in the region. Further, a mathematical analysis is performed to assess the impact of temperature and rainfall change on the transmission dynamics of the model. The periodic variation of seasonal variables as well as the non-periodic variation due to the long-term climate variation have been incorporated and analyzed. In both periodic and non-periodic cases, it has been shown that the disease-free solution of the model is globally asymptotically stable when the basic reproduction ratio is less than unity in the periodic system and when the threshold function is less than unity in the non-periodic system. The disease is uniformly persistent when the basic reproduction ratio is greater than unity in the periodic system and when the threshold function is greater than unity in the non-periodic system.