Vertical incidence increases virulence in pathogens: A model based study

Abstract

Two model systems are proposed and analyzed. In the first system the disease transmission in the population is considered to be purely horizontal, while in the second system the transmission is considered to be mixed, i.e., both horizontal and vertical transmissions are present in the system. Analytically both the systems are analyzed separately and then numerical simulations are performed to observe the effect of disease transmission in disease dynamics. Our results showed that the presence of vertical transmission along with the horizontal transmission increases the virulence of the pathogens. © 2011 Springer Science+Business Media B.V.