Optimal control and Cost-Effectiveness Analysis of Taeniasis and Cysticercois in Humans, Pigs and Cattle.
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Date
2021
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Publisher
Commun. Math. Biol. Neurosci
Abstract
Taeniasis and cysticercosis are neglected food-borne diseases that pose challenge to food safety, human
health and livelihood of rural livestock farmers. In this paper, an optimal control problem for the dynamics and
control of taeniasis and cysticercosis in humans, pigs and cattle with its cost-effectiveness analysis is presented
and analysed to determine the optimal and cost-effective strategy for disease control. A combination of two or
more time dependent controls involving vaccination of pigs and cattle, meat inspection, environmental hygiene
and sanitation, and the treatment of humans who are infected with taeniasis is carried out to study their impacts
on disease control. The Pontryagin’s maximum principle is adopted to find the necessary conditions for existence
of the optimal controls. The Runge Kutta order four forward-backward sweep method is implemented to solve
the optimal control problem. The incremental cost-effectiveness ratio (ICER) is applied to determine the most
cost-effective strategy for disease control. The optimal control results indicate that the strategy which focus on
the combination of all interventions or that exclude vaccination of pigs and cattle is the most effective optimal
control strategy in disease control. However, cost-effectiveness analysis results show that a strategy which excludes
vaccination of pigs and cattle is the most cost-effective strategy for disease control. Based on these results, we
recommend that interventions which focus on meat inspection, treatment of humans who are infected with taeniasis and improvement in hygiene and sanitation should be considered to control the transmission of taeniasis and
cysticercosis in humans, pigs and cattle at a minimal cost.
Description
Keywords
taeniasis; cysticercosis; optimal control; Hamiltonian function; cost-effectiveness analysis.