Section: New Results

Arboviruses on urban environments

We investigate the influence of human movement for the onset of an arboviral (mosquito-borne) epidemics (such as Dengue, Chikungunya, West Nile or Yellow fever) on an urban environment. The metapopulation model has a standard SIR (human)/SI (mosquito) model as the basic dynamics on the patches. The nodes consist of notification districts used by public health authorities. The subsystems are coupled by human movement. Our main result provides quantitative relations between three reproduction numbers: local - at each isolated subsystem, uniform or mixing - aggregating the data of the whole region, and the network reproduction number - for the coupled dynamics. We observe that the epidemics can spread among the patches as a consequence solely of human movement: while all nodes may have, if isolated, local reproduction ratio less than one and, moreover, the uniform reproduction number being also less than one, however, the network reproduction number can be greater than one. An estimate is provided on the overall effect of vector control on a chosen patch [13] .