Speaker
Description
Abstract: Malaria, a mosquito-borne disease, is transmitted to humans by the bite of an infectious female Anopheles mosquito and remains a major global public health burden. As of 2024, malaria accounted for an estimated 282 million cases and 610,000 deaths worldwide. In malaria transmission dynamics, asymptomatic individuals play an important role. Although such individuals do not exhibit clinical symptoms, they may still carry malaria parasites in their blood and, hence, serve as a hidden reservoir of infection. Because they often do not seek treatment due to the absence of symptoms, they can remain infectious for relatively long periods, thereby allowing susceptible mosquitoes to acquire the parasite during blood feeding and subsequently transmit it to susceptible humans. Consequently, asymptomatic infections can sustain community-level malaria transmission, particularly in endemic regions, and thereby complicate malaria control and elimination efforts. In this talk, I will present a new deterministic mathematical model, formulated as a nonlinear system of differential equations, which incorporates the effects of human behavioral change and the detection and treatment of asymptomatic infections in assessing malaria transmission control.
