Exploring trade and health policies influence on dengue spread with an agent-based model

Abstract

With the globalization, several free trade areas have been and are being created all around the world. They usually have positive consequences for increasing economic exchanges, but negative ecological or health side effects. These negative effects are difficult to predict or even to understand due to the complexity of the system and of the number of involved processes. In this article, we focus on the Southeast Asia free trade area (the ASEAN) and specifically in the East-West economic corridor. A significant correlation has been observed in this area between the corridor opening and dengue fever cases, without being able to establish a causality relationship. We choose to tackle this issue by building an agent-based geographically explicit model. We propose an approach coupling dengue fever dynamics, climate data, economic mobility and health policies, following a design methodology decomposing these processes in sub-models and linking them to make one integrated model. In addition, we propose a way to deal with lack of data in the modeling process. Our simulation results show that there is influence of the increase in mobility and application of different control policies on the increase of dengue cases.