The e ects of rural / urban movement on Dengue transmission dynamics

Five serotypes of Dengue (DENV1-DENV5), a vector-borne disease transmitted by two species of mosquitoes, Aedes aegypti and Aedes albopictus, are prevalent in various tropical and subtropical regions of the world, posing a serious health threat to humans. Dengue is no longer restricted to tropical regions due to increasing levels of mobility via travel, migration, or displacement due to con ict. We use a system of nonlinear ordinary di erential equations to explore the e ects of rural/urban movement on Dengue transmission dynamics. The model incorporates movement between rural and urban regions. The population of hosts is subdivided into susceptible, exposed, infectious, and recovered classes. Vectors, assumed to remain in a single region, are divided into rural (Ae. albopictus) and urban (Ae. aegypti) populations. The vector populations are subdivided into susceptible, exposed, and infectious classes. We compute the basic reproductive number (R0) for the system with and without movement and use this key dimensionless parameter to study the e ects of rural/urban host movement on Dengue dynamics.