MODELING THE TRANSMISSION DYNAMICS OF GIARDIASIS: INTEGRATING COST-EFFECTIVENESS AND OPTIMAL CONTROL STRATEGIES

Résumé fourni par la source

Giardiasis, caused by the protozoan parasite Giardia intestinalis, poses a significant public health burden worldwide, particularly in regions with limited access to clean water and sanitation infrastructure. Understanding the transmission dynamics of giardiasis and evaluating intervention strategies are crucial for effective disease control. In this study, we apply the theory of optimal control to the giardiasis model. The model includes public health education, treatment, and sanitation as the control measures for giardiasis. The goal is to minimize the infections in the population brought on by interactions with asymptomatic, symptomatic, and contaminated environments while reducing the cost of the control measures. We accomplish this goal by using Pontryagin’s Maximum Principle, where fourth-order Runge–Kutta is used to perform numerical simulations for both forward and backward in-time schemes. We simulate the model under different control scenarios to determine which strategy could produce the greatest results. The results demonstrate that the control strategy combining the three control measures (public health education, treatment, and sanitation) proves to be more effective in curbing the spread of giardiasis. Moreover, the incremental cost-effectiveness ratio (ICER) is used to analyze cost-effectiveness. The cost-effectiveness analysis revealed that the strategy that contains treatment and sanitation is the best strategy to implement in the population in case of budget constraints. Hence, our study recommends that sanitizing the environment and treating the infected individuals immediately could be the best practice for controlling the spread of giardiasis disease on an entire population.

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