Modelling the Impacts of Bed-Nets and Awareness Campaign on Malaria Transmission Dynamics in Hong Local Government Area, Adamawa State Nigeria

Malaria is one of the most devastating infectious disease that is transmitted to human through the bite of mosquitoes. In many African countries such as Nigeria, malaria remains a significant threat to life and is impacting negatively on the economy. One area that requires more attention in terms of malaria burden is spreading awareness campaign for people to adopt certain protective measures against the disease. Using ordinary differential equations (ODE), we formulated a modified deterministic mathematical model of malaria transmission dynamics incorporating effects of awareness campaign and bed-net usage. The model was extended to study the effects of environmental variability through incorporation stochastic perturbations into the ODE model. We then formulated and distributed some questionnaires that enabled us to estimate some of the model parameters to suit Hong local government area. We investigated some basic properties of the model to show that the models are physically meaningful. The disease-free equilibrium point of the model is shown to be locally asymptotically stable if a certain threshold quantity, called reproduction number is smaller than unity. The numerical simulation of the models confirmed some of the theoretical analyses conducted. We studied the global sensitivity analysis of the model parameters to identify the parameters that have high impact on the reproduction number. Our results show that level of awareness of malaria in Hong local government area is above average, and about 64% of the people in the area are using bed-nets. We also find that the results of simulations for the deterministic model generally underestimates the corresponding stochastic results. Our sensitivity analysis results show that increasing mosquitoes death rates have more significants impacts on the reproduction number and hence, the disease burden.