Assessing the impact of control interventions and awareness on malaria: a mathematical modeling approach

Abstract

Malaria is a vector-borne contagious disease which remains a public health burden for decades. It is highly endemic in Sub-Saharan African, and an estimated number of two hundred and twenty-eight million cases was reported in 2018 around the world. We develop and examine a deterministic model which describes the transmission dynamics of malaria between mosquito and human populations and examine the impacts of control interventions with their level of awareness on its control. The malaria-free equilibrium of the model is shown to be locally asymptotically stable if the threshold quantity R₀ < 1. We study the stability of the endemic equilibrium and the conditions for the existence of backward bifurcation are presented. A sensitivity analysis was done to measure the outcome of the control intervention parameters on the reproduction number. The result shows that residual spray and bed-net usage are the most important parameter on the reproduction number. A numerical simulation was carried out and the result shows that combining bed-net usage and residual spray will reduce the burden of malaria faster. Particularly, results suggest that awareness and proportion of bed-net usage and residual spray should be priorities and increased to at least 75% for the possibilities of eliminating malaria.