Assessing health burden risk and control effect on dengue fever infection in the southern region of Taiwan

Cheng, Yi-Hsien; Lin, Yi-Jun; Chen, Szu-Chieh; You, Shu-Han; Chen, Wei-Yu; Hsieh, Nan-Hung; Yang, Ying-Fei; Liao, Chung-Min

Kaohsiung, located in southern Taiwan with a typical tropical climate, the second largest metropolitan with dense populations, is a major dengue epidemic area with ~ >50% confirmed dengue cases each year. Officially notifiable data on the monthly dengue cases in Kaohsiung in the period 2001-2014 were obtained from the Centers for Disease Control, Taiwan The previously developed dengue-mosquito-human transmission model 16, 27 was adopted to describe the dynamics of vector-host interactions and to estimate the disease epidemics. The essential features of the mosquito-human transmission model are depicted in Figure 1 . There are four compartments constituting mosquito population dynamics including 1) pre-adult mosquitoes composed of eggs, larvae, and pupae and 2) adult mosquitoes that can be divided into susceptible (S m ), exposed but not yet infectious (E m ), and infectious dengue virus-carrying mosquitoes (I m ) based on infectious status ( Figure 1A ). On the other hand, the susceptible-exposed infectious recovery compartmentalized disease transmission model was implemented to simulate the dengue virus transmission within human populations ( Figure 1B ).