A Mathematical Model for the Dynamics of Cholera with Control Measures

Abstract

Cholera, an acute gastro-intestinal infection and a waterborne disease continues to emerge in developing countries and remains an important global health challenge. In this paper, we formulate a mathematical model that captures some essential dynamics of cholera transmission with public health educational campaigns, vaccination, sanitation and treatment as control strategies in limiting the disease. The reproduction numbers with single and combined controls are computed and compared with each other to assess the possible community benefits. Numerical simulation shows that in a unique control strategy, treatment yields the best results followed by education campaign, then sanitation and vaccination being the last. Furthermore, we noted that the control of cholera is very much better when we incorporated more than one strategy, in two controls the results were better than one strategy, and in three control strategies the results were far better than in two control strategies. Further simulations with all four interventions showed the best results among all combinations attained before. We performed sensitivity analysis on the key parameters that drive the disease dynamics in order to determine their relative importance to disease transmission and prevalence.