Section: Overall Objectives

Fields of application

We are interested in applying the research themes described above to the following epidemiological problems:

1. Intra-host models for malaria.

2. Metapopulation models considering the dynamics of Plasmodium falciparum causing tropical malaria in human populations, and the development of drug resistance.

3. Modeling the dynamics of immunity in human populations in endemic areas. Models describing the intra-host parasite dynamics, considering the development and loss of immunity.

4. Spread of epidemics of arbovirus diseases (dengue, chikungunya ...)

5. Disease leading to structured model to allow to take into account the effect of asymptomatic carriers, differential infectivity or differential susceptibility (HBV, Meningitis ...)

One of the challenges of the project is to ensure the relevance of these models. It is important to closely involve the “end users" (specialists in the fields, experimenters, observers, physicians, epidemiologists, entomologists, etc.) and “providers" (mathematicians, statisticians, computer scientists, ...). Users are able to bring a critical evaluation on the quality of results, to validate them or exploit them further. For example we want to understand the genetic diversity and structure of African Plasmodium falciparum population. The spread of drug resistance is due to gene flow and the scale of Plasmodium falciparum population structure. A better understanding of Plasmodium falciparum population genetics is necessary to adjust control measures. The findings of Rogier et al.  [17] suggest that malaria epidemiology in urban areas depends on local transmission, geographic isolation, and parasite flow between the city and the surrounding rural areas. The molecular geneticists use many different statistical measures of distance. (For example $F_{st}$, Nei's distance...). It is important in our modeling process to understand how these measures can be obtained as output of our models.