Dengue epidemics and human mobility

TL;DR

This paper investigates how human mobility influences the spread of dengue, demonstrating that movement patterns can significantly drive disease dispersion in urban environments.

Contribution

It combines a stochastic dengue model with a network-based human mobility representation to analyze disease spread mechanisms.

Findings

Human mobility can be the main factor in disease dispersal.

Mobility patterns significantly affect epidemic dynamics.

Network structure influences the speed of dengue spread.

Abstract

In this work we explore the effects of human mobility on the dispersion of a vector borne disease. We combine an already presented stochastic model for dengue with a simple representation of the daily motion of humans on a schematic city of 20x20 blocks with 100 inhabitants in each block. The pattern of motion of the individuals is described in terms of complex networks in which links connect different blocks and the link length distribution is in accordance with recent findings on human mobility. It is shown that human mobility can turn out to be the main driving force of the disease dispersal.