Abstract
Public health education, including mass and interpersonal communication, has been recognized as an effective control of infectious disease. Compared to the well-studied mass communication by dynamic modelling, not much mathematical study has been done on the effect of interpersonal communication. Here, we build a model, to study the overall impact of mass communication and interpersonal communication on disease spread and disease control during the transmission process. By analysing the dynamic behaviour of our model, we find two threshold parameters on which the disease persistence and extinction condition depend. We further prove that the endemic equilibrium, whenever existing, is locally asymptotically stable. Its global stability is also verified. And the impact of public health education on the behaviours of the model is considered by numerical simulation. Our study confirms the value of various education activities and shows that public health education may affect the epidemic threshold.
Highlights
Infectious diseases have always been a major public health threat to human life and health
Compared to the well-studied mass communication by dynamic modelling, not much mathematical study has been done on the effect of interpersonal communication
Effective public health education is a cornerstone in the primary prevention and control of infectious disease and can reduce the social burden of the disease [11]
Summary
Infectious diseases have always been a major public health threat to human life and health. With the impact of public health education on epidemic diseases, many mathematical models have been proposed, which focus on studying the impact of mass communication, by either stochastic differential equation model or a deterministic model In these models, called compartmental models, mass communication is mainly reflected in two aspects: introducing some new population categories, and changing incidence function to reflect the ‘psychological’ effect. We denote awareness spread rate by mass communication with γ ; The effect of interpersonal communication, is described as the individual in unaware susceptible class S1 gaining the disease information through communicating with the aware susceptible individual S2 or the infected I, with δS1S2 and (1 − p)β1S1I, respectively. There is a unique endemic equilibrium in the region IV, representing 1 < R2 < R1
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