AMMCS-2013 Semi-Plenary Talk

The spatio-temporal spread of drug-resistant tuberculosis

Julien Arino (University of Manitoba)

Abstract: Tuberculosis is, after HIV/AIDS, the second largest cause of infectious disease induced death. It is estimated that in 2011, it killed 1.4 million people worldwide. Tuberculosis is also a disease of poverty, as contributing factors to its spread include poor and overcrowded living conditions, poor health conditions, etc. As a consequence, over 95% of new infections and deaths by tuberculosis occur in developping countries.

We formulate a model for tuberculosis in a single population that includes three strains: a drug-sensitive strain, MDR-TB and XDR-TB. We study the model mathematically and show, in particular, that the bifurcation structure of the whole model is governed by the behaviour of the XDR-TB strain. We then extend the model to a metapopulation setting, in which each country is a vertex in a multi-digraph, endowed with a system for the single population case. Weighted arcs between the vertices represent the rate of travel of individuals between the countries. We study the resulting large-scale system. Finally, we proceed to numerical experiments with realistic travel and population data.

This is a joint work with K. Khan (University of Manitoba) and I. Soliman (St Michael's Hospital, Toronto).

Julien Arino received his PhD in 2001 from Universit� Joseph Fourier in Grenoble, France in affiliation with INRIA Sophia Antipolis and the Villefranche-sur-mer Oceanological Observatory. He held postdoctoral fellowships at the University of Victoria (Jan 2001-Dec 2002) and McMaster University (Jan 2003-Jun 2005).

Since 2005, he has been a faculty member at the University of Manitoba. He is currently a member of the Bio.Diaspora Project, which is based at St Michael's Hospital (Toronto), and the Centre for Disease Modelling, which is hosted at York University.