Modeling the Geographic Spread of Rabies in China

Human rabies is one of the major public health problems in China. Dogs are the main infection source, which contributes 85%-95% of human cases in China. In the past few years, due to the dog trade, immigration of dogs became essential to understand the transmission dynamics of rabies in China. For example, some provinces such ad Shaanxi and Shanxi, used to be rabies free, have increasing numbers of human infectious cases. In 2005, the Institute for Viral Disease Control and Prevention of China CDC cooperated with the provincial CDC laboratories and began collecting samples from dog population in regions where human rabies cases had been reported; additionally all the positive samples in DFA and RT-PCR detection were submitted for DNA sequencing. Then a spatial dynamic analysis to identify structure in the geographic diffusion of the rabies virus in China was performed at the provincial level. Based on these scientific results, we propose a multi patch model for transmission of rabies in China, which consists of eight compartments of dogs and humans in each patch. We also simulate the data of three pairs of provinces from Chinese Ministry of Health and a sensitivity analysis of the basic reproduction number is performed in order to understand how the dog movement influence the disease spread. Some disease prevention and control strategies will be given according to the mathematical analysis of the model and simulations. This is a joint work with Lan Zou and Shigui Ruan