A malaria model with partial immunity in humans

Abstract

In this paper, we formulate a mathematical model for malaria transmission that includes incubation periods for both infected human hosts and mosquitoes. We assume humans gain partial immunity after infection and divide the infected human population into subgroups based on their infection history. We derive an explicit formula for the reproductive number of infection, R( 0), to determine threshold conditions whether the disease spreads or dies out. We show that there exists an endemic equilibrium if R( 0)>1. Using an numerical example, we demonstrate that models having the same reproductive number but different numbers of progression stages can exhibit different transient transmission dynamics.