Abstract
In many developing countries, including Nepal, rabies epidemics constitute a serious public health concern, partly because of limited resources for proper implementation of control measures. In this study, we develop an extended model by incorporating various controls into the transmission dynamics model with both dog and jackal vectors. We apply the optimal control theory on the developed model system to identify optimal control strategy for mitigating rabies burden in Nepal with limited resources. Among the potential control strategies, human vaccination, dog vaccination, dog culling, dog sterilization, and jackal vaccination, considered in this study, our results show that a combination of dog vaccination and dog culling is the most effective strategy to control rabies in Nepal. Our optimal control solutions provide the strategy for optimal implementation of these controls to suppress rabies prevalence among dogs and jackals of Nepal using a minimum cost associated with controls. We found that given limited resources, implementing controls in a time-dependent manner with a higher level at the beginning of the outbreaks and reducing them during later part of the epidemics can provide maximum benefits.
Highlights
Rabies, a viral zoonotic disease, remains an ongoing burden in many developing countries, including Nepal
We developed a model that couple both dog and jackal along with human population to describe transmission dynamics of rabies in Nepal, and identified that consideration of both vectors is essential for successful mitigation of rabies in Nepal [21]
We consider the rabies prevalence among dogs and jackal populations under each combined strategy with 10% coverage level of each of two strategies included in the combination. For this level of (10%, 10%) coverage, our results show that the rabies prevalence for dog population remains 0.0001%, 0.0040%, 0.0036%, 0.1362%, 0.0023% and 0.0056% for combined strategies with dog vaccination and dog culling, jackal vaccination and dog vaccination, dog vaccination and dog sterilization, dog sterilization and jackal vaccination, dog culling and dog sterilization, and jackal vaccination and dog culling, respectively
Summary
A viral zoonotic disease, remains an ongoing burden in many developing countries, including Nepal. Dog and jackal vectors; mathematical model; optimal control theory; rabies in Nepal; resource limitation. It is important to identify optimal strategy to implement control programs regarding underlying situation of two different vectors and limited resources. For such purposes, optimal control theory has been proved to be useful tool as in many previous epidemic controls, including rabies epidemics [5, 7, 13, 15, 16, 19, 20, 23, 25]. Implementing optimal control theory and related numerical method, we compute the optimal control strategy for successful control of rabies epidemic in Nepal
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