Optimal Control and Cost Effectiveness Analysis for the Transmission Dynamics of Yaws Infection

Abstract

This work considered a neglected bacterial disease for which non-linear model of yaws infection with time dependent control measures was developed to study the effect of the control measures in tackling the disease transmission in the population. Optimal control strategy was developed in order to investigate and analyze the optimal cost for controlling the transmission of the diseases in the population. Pontryagin’s Maximum Principles (PMP) was applied to carry out economic evaluations in order to optimize the cost of the intervention in the models and also to optimize the objective functional so as to establish the most optimal control strategy in tackling the spread of the infections. Numerical simulations had been carried-out for the model using forward-backward Runge-Kutta of order four to study the effect of the control strategies and also to calculate the incremental cost effectiveness ratios (ICERs) for the implementation of various combinations of the control parameters for the yaws infection in order to determine the most cost effective strategy that could check the spread of the disease. The findings showed that the most cost-effective strategy to check the spread of yaws infection is the combination of personal hygiene and treatment for infection as a single control strategy