Mathematical model for plant disease dynamics with curative and preventive treatments

Abstract

An increasing number of world population leads to an increase need of food. However, plant disease can reduce the production and quality of food. Therefore, understanding plant disease dynamics is important as it can provide insightful knowledge on plant disease transmission. A mathematical model can be used to investigate plant disease dynamics and analyse the effect of disease control strategies. In this paper, we develop a deterministic mathematical model where the plant population is divided into five compartments: Susceptible, Exposed, Infection, Post-Infectious (Removed), and Protected. We include the preventive and curative treatments in the model and analyse their effects on plant disease transmission dynamics. We analytically determine the equilibrium points and epidemic threshold conditions. Several numerical simulations are given to support the analytical results. We found that implementing preventive and curative treatments simultaneously can help in reducing number of infected plants.