Global stability of SIR epidemic models with a wide class of nonlinear incidence rates and distributed delays

Abstract

In this paper, we establish the global asymptotic stability of equi-libria for an SIR model of infectious diseases with distributed time delays gov-erned by a wide class of nonlinear incidence rates. We obtain the global prop-erties of the model by proving the permanence and constructing a suitable Lyapunov functional. Under some suitable assumptions on the nonlinear term in the incidence rate, the global dynamics of the model is completely deter-mined by the basic reproduction number R0 and the distributed delays do not influence the global dynamics of the model.