On a Reaction-Diffusion System Modeling Infectious Diseases Without Life-time Immunity

Yin, Hong-Ming

In this paper we study a mathematical model for an infectious disease such as Cholera without life-time immunity. Due to the different mobility for susceptible, infected human and recovered human hosts, the diffusion coefficients are assumed to be different. The resulting system is governed by a strongly coupled reaction-diffusion system with different diffusion coefficients. Global existence and uniqueness are established under certain assumptions on known data. Moreover, global asymptotic behavior of the solution is obtained when some parameters satisfy certain conditions. These results extend the existing results in the literature. The main tool used in this paper comes from the delicate theory of elliptic and parabolic equations. Moreover, the energy method and Sobolev embedding are used in deriving {\em apriori} estimates. The analysis developed in this paper can be employed to study other epidemic models in biological and ecological systems.