A Lyapunov-Schmidt method for detecting backward bifurcation in age-structured population models.

Backward bifurcation is an important property of infectious disease models. A centre manifold method has been developed by Castillo-Chavez and Song for detecting the presence of backward bifurcation and deriving a necessary and sufficient condition for its occurrence in Ordinary Differential Equations (ODE) models. In this paper, we extend this method to partial differential equation systems. First, we state a main theorem. Next we illustrate the application of the new method on a chronological age-structured Susceptible-Infected-Susceptible (SIS) model with density-dependent recovery rate, an age-since-infection structured HIV/AIDS model with standard incidence and an age-since-infection structured cholera model with vaccination.