Speaker
Description
The outbreak of Mpox in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) in 2024 spread internationally, prompting the WHO to declare a public health emergency and underscoring the need to understand the disease’s transmission dynamics and potential control measures. We develop and analyze two different models for Mpox transmission. The first deals with the outbreak of Mpox in a single human population group, incorporating transmission between humans and animals. Using this model, we derive an expression for the basic reproductive number ($R_0$) for the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) and the Rest of the World (ROW) using surveillance data. The second model extends the single human population to a two-patch framework, coupling DRC with ROW and examines the role of inter-patch mobility through a residence-time framework under a range of mobility scenarios. We estimate the meta-population reproduction number $R_{0T}$. We note that while mobility has a modest effect on $R_{0T}$, the disease burden varies substantially with changing mobility. Across a wide range of mobility values, the infected population in DRC increases with mobility, while that in the ROW decreases with mobility; this observation has important policy implications for travel restrictions during the outbreak.
