The interplay of vaccination and vector control on small dengue networks

Dengue fever is a major public health issue a↵ecting billions of people in over 100 countries across the globe. This challenge is growing as the invasive mosquito vectors,Aedes aegyptiand Aedes albopictus, expand their distributions and increase their population sizes. Hence there is an increasing need to devise e↵ective control methods that can contain dengue outbreaks. Here we construct an epidemiological model for virus transmission between vectors and hosts on a network of host populations distributed among city and town patches, and investigate disease control through vaccination and vector control using variants of the sterile insect technique (SIT). Analysis of the basic reproductive number and simulations indicate that host movement across this small network influences the severity of epidemics. Both vaccination and vector control strategies are investigated as methods of disease containment and our results indicate that these controls can be made more e↵ective with mixed strategy solutions. We predict that reduced lethality through poor SIT methods or imperfectly e"cacious vaccines will impact e↵orts to control disease spread. In particular, weakly e"cacious vaccination strategies against multiple virus serotype diversity may be counter productive to disease control e↵orts. Even so, failings of one method may be mitigated by supplementing it with an alternative control strategy. Generally, our network approach encourages decision making to consider connected populations, to emphasise that successful control methods must e↵ectively suppress dengue epidemics at this landscape scale