Personal Protection Campaigns: Modeling Control Strategies in Vector-Borne Disease Epidemiology

Personal protection measures, such as bed nets and repellents, are important tools for the suppression of vector-borne diseases like malaria and Zika. The ability of health agencies to distribute personal protection equipment, and encourage its use, plays an important role in the efficacy of disease management strategies. Recent modeling studies have discovered that a counterintuitive diversity-driven amplification in community-wide disease levels can occur when a population only partially adopts personal protection measures.  In this way, partial adoption becomes detrimental to the larger goal of disease management. This ‘amplification effect,’ however, may overestimate the negative impact of personal protection as a result of implicit, restrictive model assumptions regarding population compliance, access to personal protection measures, and the longevity of those measures. We establish a new modeling methodology for exploring control efforts in vector-borne disease systems featuring personal protection. This new method flexibly accounts for compliance, access, longevity, and control strategies by way of a flow between protected and unprotected populations rather than breaking the population into static protected and unprotected classes as has been done previously. Our new methodology yields large reductions in the severity and occurrence of amplification effects as compared to existing models.