4 Minimal cost-time strategies for mosquito population replacement

Abstract

Vector control plays a central role in the fight against vector-borne diseases and, in particular, arboviruses. The use of the endosymbiotic bacterium Wolbachia has proven to be effective in preventing the transmission of some of these viruses between mosquitoes and humans, making it a promising control tool. The population replacement technique we consider consists in replacing the wild population by a population carrying the aforementioned bacterium, thereby preventing outbreaks of the associated vector-borne diseases. In this work, we consider a two-species model incorporating both Wolbachia infected and wild mosquitoes. Our system can be controlled thanks to a term representing an artificial introduction of Wolbachia-infected mosquitoes. Under the assumption that the birth rate of mosquitoes is high, we may reduce the model to a simpler one regarding the proportion of infected mosquitoes. We investigate minimal cost-time strategies to achieve a population replacement both analytically and numerically for the simplified 1D model and only numerically for the full 2D system.