Abstract
Rift Valley Fever is a vector-borne disease mainly transmitted by mosquito. To gain some quantitative insights into its dynamics, a deterministic model with mosquito, livestock, and human host is formulated as a system of nonlinear ordinary differential equations and analyzed. The disease threshold \(\mathcal{R}_0\) is computed and used to investigate the local stability of the equilibria. A sensitivity analysis is performed and the most sensitive model parameters to the measure of initial disease transmission \(\mathcal{R}_0\) and the endemic equilibrium are determined. Both \(\mathcal{R}_0\) and the disease prevalence in mosquitoes are more sensitive to the natural mosquito death rate, d m . The disease prevalence in livestock and humans are more sensitive to livestock and human recruitment rates, \(\Uppi_l\) and \(\Uppi_h\), respectively, suggesting isolation of livestock from humans is a viable preventive strategy during an outbreak. Numerical simulations support the analytical results in further exploring theoretically the long-term dynamics of the disease at the population level.
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Acknowledgments
Mpeshe would like to thank the following institutions for support: Tumaini University (Iringa University College)-Tanzania, Belgium Technical Cooperation-Tanzania, and Lappeenranta University of Technology-Finland. However, the conclusions are those of the authors and not influenced by any institution. Thanks to the reviewers for constructive comments.
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Mpeshe, S.C., Haario, H. & Tchuenche, J.M. A Mathematical Model of Rift Valley Fever with Human Host. Acta Biotheor 59, 231–250 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10441-011-9132-2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10441-011-9132-2