Optimal control and cost-effectiveness analysis of taeniasis and cysticercosis in humans, pigs and cattle

Abstract

Taeniasis and cysticercosis are neglected food-borne diseases that pose challenge to food safety, human health and livelihood of rural livestock farmers. In this paper, an optimal control problem for the dynamics and control of taeniasis and cysticercosis in humans, pigs and cattle with its cost-effectiveness analysis is presented and analysed to determine the optimal and cost-effective strategy for disease control. A combination of two or more time dependent controls involving vaccination of pigs and cattle, meat inspection, environmental hygiene and sanitation, and the treatment of humans who are infected with taeniasis is carried out to study their impacts on disease control. The Pontryagin’s maximum principle is adopted to find the necessary conditions for existence of the optimal controls. The Runge Kutta order four forward-backward sweep method is implemented to solve the optimal control problem. The incremental cost-effectiveness ratio (ICER) is applied to determine the most cost-effective strategy for disease control. The optimal control results indicate that the strategy which focus on the combination of all interventions or that exclude vaccination of pigs and cattle is the most effective optimal control strategy in disease control. However, cost-effectiveness analysis results show that a strategy which excludes vaccination of pigs and cattle is the most cost-effective strategy for disease control. Based on these results, we recommend that interventions which focus on meat inspection, treatment of humans who are infected with taeniasis and improvement in hygiene and sanitation should be considered to control the transmission of taeniasis and cysticercosis in humans, pigs and cattle at a minimal cost.