On a Reaction-Diffusion System Modeling Infectious Diseases Without Life-time Immunity

TL;DR

This paper analyzes a reaction-diffusion model for infectious diseases like Cholera that lack lifelong immunity, establishing global existence, uniqueness, and asymptotic behavior of solutions with different host mobility patterns.

Contribution

It extends existing epidemic models by incorporating different diffusion coefficients for susceptible, infected, and recovered hosts, and provides rigorous mathematical analysis of the system.

Findings

Proved global existence and uniqueness of solutions.

Derived conditions for asymptotic stability.

Extended mathematical techniques to epidemic modeling.

Abstract

In this paper we study a mathematical model for an infectious disease such as Cholera without life-time immunity. Due to the different mobility for susceptible, infected human and recovered human hosts, the diffusion coefficients are assumed to be different. The resulting system is governed by a strongly coupled reaction-diffusion system with different diffusion coefficients. Global existence and uniqueness are established under certain assumptions on known data. Moreover, global asymptotic behavior of the solution is obtained when some parameters satisfy certain conditions. These results extend the existing results in the literature. The main tool used in this paper comes from the delicate theory of elliptic and parabolic equations. Moreover, the energy method and Sobolev embedding are used in deriving {\em apriori} estimates. The analysis developed in this paper can be employed to study other epidemic models in biological and ecological systems.