Wednesday, December 13, 2006 - 10:29 AM
1079

A tick-borne disease metapopulation model

Holly Gaff, hgaff@epi.umaryland.edu, University of Maryland - Baltimore, Department of Epidemiology and Preventive Medicine, 660 W. Redwood St, Howard Hall 140D, Baltimore, MD and Louis Gross, University of Tennessee, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, 569 Dabney Hall, Knoxville, TN.

Recent increases in reported outbreaks of tick-borne diseases have led to increased interest in understanding and controlling epidemics involving these transmission vectors. Mathematical disease models typically assume constant population size and spatial homogeneity. For tick-borne diseases, these assumptions are not always valid. The disease model presented incorporates non-constant population sizes and spatial heterogeneity utilizing a system of differential equations that may be applied to a variety of spatial patches. We present analytical results for the one patch version and find parameter restrictions under which the populations and infected densities reach equilibrium. We then numerically explore disease dynamics when parameters are allowed to vary spatially and temporally and consider the effectiveness of various tick-control strategies.


Species 1: Acari Ixodidae Amblyomma americanum (lone Star Tick)

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