Control of water-borne diseases via awareness and vaccination using multilayer networks

Abstract

Communicable diseases are one of the challenges to people’s health and fitness. Consuming contaminated water or food and inhaling contaminated water droplets are the main causes of water-borne pathogens spread. This paper studies the spreading dynamics of water-borne diseases with vaccination and preventive measures over a multilayer network. SVIR-process for disease spread over humans and SIS-process for disease spread over water supply mediums and UAU-process for awareness diffusion over humans via social media are taken to study the spreading dynamics. The Discrete-time Markov chain approach is used to frame and analyse the model. The optimal value corresponding to the vaccination parameter is found to control the disease spread. The impact of awareness and vaccination over disease spread and the characteristics of basic reproduction number are found via numerical simulation.

Keywords

• Water-borne disease spread
• Awareness for vaccination and preventive measures
• Water-bodies contamination via human activities
• Basic reproduction number
• Optimal vaccination