Application of mathematical modelling to inform national malaria intervention planning in Nigeria.

Background: For their 2021-2025 National Malaria Strategic Plan (NMSP), Nigeria's National Malaria Elimination Programme (NMEP), in partnership with the World Health Organization (WHO), developed a targeted approach to intervention deployment at the local government area (LGA) level as part of the High Burden to High Impact response. Mathematical models of malaria transmission were used to predict the impact of proposed intervention strategies on malaria burden.

Methods: An agent-based model of Plasmodium falciparum transmission was used to simulate malaria morbidity and mortality in Nigeria's 774 LGAs under four possible intervention strategies from 2020 to 2030.

A validated mathematical model of FGFR3-mediated tumor growth reveals pathways to harness the benefits of combination targeted therapy and immunotherapy in bladder cancer.

Bladder cancer is a common malignancy with over 80,000 estimated new cases and nearly 18,000 deaths per year in the United States alone. Therapeutic options for metastatic bladder cancer had not evolved much for nearly four decades, until recently, when five immune checkpoint inhibitors were approved by the U.S.

Weather-driven malaria transmission model with gonotrophic and sporogonic cycles.

Malaria is mainly a tropical disease and its transmission cycle is heavily influenced by environment: The life-cycles of the mosquito vector and parasite are both strongly affected by ambient temperature, while suitable aquatic habitat is necessary for immature mosquito development. Therefore, how global warming may affect malaria burden is an active question, and we develop a new ordinary differential equations-based malaria transmission model that explicitly considers the temperature-dependent gonotrophic and sporogonic cycles. Mosquito dynamics are coupled to infection among a human population with symptomatic and asymptomatic disease carriers, as well as temporary immunity.

Mathematical analysis of a model for zoonotic visceral leishmaniasis.

Zoonotic visceral leishmaniasis (ZVL), caused by the protozoan parasite and transmitted to humans and reservoir hosts by female sandflies, is endemic in many parts of the world (notably in Africa, Asia and the Mediterranean). This study presents a new mathematical model for assessing the transmission dynamics of ZVL in human and non-human animal reservoir populations. The model undergoes the usual phenomenon of backward bifurcation exhibited by similar vector-borne disease transmission models.

Mathematical analysis of a weather-driven model for the population ecology of mosquitoes.

A new deterministic model for the population biology of immature and mature mosquitoes is designed and used to assess the impact of temperature and rainfall on the abundance of mosquitoes in a community. The trivial equilibrium of the model is globally-asymptotically stable when the associated vectorial reproduction number (R0) is less than unity. In the absence of density-dependence mortality in the larval stage, the autonomous version of the model has a unique and globally-asymptotically stable non-trivial equilibrium whenever 1 andlt;R0 andlt;RC0 (this equilibrium bifurcates into a limit cycle, via a Hopf bifurcation at R0=RC0).

Analysis of a temperature- and rainfall-dependent model for malaria transmission dynamics.

A new non-autonomous model is designed and used to assess the impact of variability in temperature and rainfall on the transmission dynamics of malaria in a population. In addition to adding age-structure in the host population and the dynamics of immature malaria mosquitoes, a notable feature of the new model is that recovered individuals do not revert to wholly-susceptible class (that is, recovered individuals enjoy reduced susceptibility to new malaria infection). In the absence of disease-induced mortality, the disease-free solution of the model is shown to be globally-asymptotically stable when the associated reproduction ratio is less than unity.

Mass Media and the Contagion of Fear: The Case of Ebola in America.

Background: In the weeks following the first imported case of Ebola in the U. S. on September 29, 2014, coverage of the very limited outbreak dominated the news media, in a manner quite disproportionate to the actual threat to national public health; by the end of October, 2014, there were only four laboratory confirmed cases of Ebola in the entire nation.