A model for the spatial transmission of dengue with daily movement between villages and a city.

Dengue is a re-emergent vector-borne disease affecting large portions of the world's population living in the tropics and subtropics. The virus is transmitted through the bites of female Aedes aegypti mosquitoes, and it is widely believed that these bites occur primarily in the daytime. The transmission of dengue is a complicated process, and one of the main sources of this complexity is due to the movement of people, e.g. between home and their places of work. Hence, the mechanics of disease progression may also differ between day and night. A discrete-time multi-patch dengue transmission model which takes into account the mobility of people as well as processes of infection, recovery, recruitment, mortality, and outbound and return movements is considered here. One patch (the city) is connected to all other patches (the villages) in a spoke-like network. We obtain here the basic reproductive ratio (ℛ0) of the transmission model which represents a threshold for an epidemic to occur. Dynamical analysis for vector control, human treatment and vaccination, and different kinds of mobility are performed. It is shown that changes in human movement patterns can, in some situations, affect the ability of the disease to persist in a predictable manner. We conclude with biological implications for the prevention and control of dengue virus transmission.