On a two-season faecal-oral model with impulsive intervention

TL;DR

This paper develops a mathematical model for waterborne faecal-oral diseases considering seasonal rainfall, impulsive interventions, and moving infection boundaries, providing new analytical tools and criteria for disease control.

Contribution

It introduces a novel two-season switching model with impulsive intervention and free boundaries, addressing complex seasonal and intervention effects in disease dynamics.

Findings

Impulsive intervention and seasonal switching influence disease spread.

Longer dry seasons improve disease control.

Higher intervention intensity enhances disease suppression.

Abstract

Rainfall is associated with the outbreak of certain waterborne faecal-oral diseases, driving the implementation of various human interventions for their control and prevention. Taking into account human intervention and temporal variation in rainfall, this paper develops a two-season switching faecal-oral model with impulsive intervention and free boundaries. In this model, the infection fronts are represented by fixed boundaries during the dry season and by moving boundaries during the wet season, with impulsive intervention occurring at the end of each wet season. The simultaneous introduction of impulsive intervention and seasonal switching creates new difficulties for mathematical analysis. We overcome these challenges through novel analytical techniques, resulting in a spreading-vanishing dichotomy and a sharp criteria governing this dichotomy. Finally, numerical simulations are presented to validate the theoretical results and to visually illustrate the influence of seasonal switching and impulsive intervention. Our results mathematically explain that two factors, the duration of the dry season and the intensity of impulsive intervention are both positively correlated with effective disease control.