A metapopulation approach to identify targets for Wolbachia-based dengue control.

Over the last decade, the release of Wolbachia-infected Aedes aegypti into the natural habitat of this mosquito species has become the most sustainable and long-lasting technique to prevent and control vector-borne diseases, such as dengue, zika, or chikungunya. However, the limited resources to generate such mosquitoes and their effective distribution in large areas dominated by the Aedes aegypti vector represent a challenge for policymakers. Here, we introduce a mathematical framework for the spread of dengue in which competition between wild and Wolbachia-infected mosquitoes, the cross-contagion patterns between humans and vectors, the heterogeneous distribution of the human population in different areas, and the mobility flows between them are combined. Our framework allows us to identify the most effective areas for the release of Wolbachia-infected mosquitoes to achieve a large decrease in the global dengue prevalence.

Markovian approach to tackle the interaction of simultaneous diseases.

The simultaneous emergence of several abrupt disease outbreaks or the extinction of some serotypes of multistrain diseases are fingerprints of the interaction between pathogens spreading within the same population. Here, we propose a general and versatile benchmark to address the unfolding of both cooperative and competitive interacting diseases. We characterize the explosive transitions between the disease-free and the epidemic regimes arising from the cooperation between pathogens and show the critical degree of cooperation needed for the onset of such abrupt transitions. For the competing diseases, we characterize the mutually exclusive case and derive analytically the transition point between the full-dominance phase, in which only one pathogen propagates, and the coexistence regime. Finally, we use this framework to analyze the behavior of the former transition point as the competition between pathogens is relaxed.