Modeling the Spread of Epidemic Cholera: an Age-Structured Model

Abstract

Occasional outbreaks of cholera epidemics across the world demonstrate that this disease continues to pose a public health threat. Traditional models for the spread of infectious diseases are based on systems of ordinary differential equations. Since the risk for contracting cholera depends on the age of the humans, an age-structured model offers additional insights and the possibility to study the effects of treatment options. The model is given as a system of hyperbolic partial differential equations. We present a finite difference approximation to the model and validate it by studying the effect of high and low rates of shedding of cholera vibrios on the dynamics of the spread of the disease.