Department of Mathematics, Kyungpook National University, Daegu 702-701, Republic of Korea.
J Theor Biol. 2010 Sep 7;266(1):154-61. doi: 10.1016/j.jtbi.2010.06.015. Epub 2010 Jun 23.
The bacteria Orientia tsutsugamushi is the causative agent of scrub typhus, a prevalent disease in Asian countries that can affect humans and which shows an alarming increase of cases during the last years, especially in rural areas. Unfortunately, there is no vaccine for scrub typhus, and antibiotic treatments successfully used in the past appear to be inefficient to treat some strains of O. tsutsugamushi. We introduce a mathematical model that approximates the dynamics of the bacteria among its natural reservoirs. After computing the basic reproductive number from the proposed model, we explore its sensitivity to the parameter values that may be affected by application of control measures. This theoretical model may be of interest to pest managers as well as health authorities interested in gaining insight into the public management of the disease, through a better understanding of its qualitative dynamics.
恙虫病东方体是恙虫病的病原体，这是一种在亚洲国家流行的疾病，近年来发病率呈上升趋势，尤其是在农村地区。不幸的是，目前还没有针对恙虫病的疫苗，过去使用的抗生素治疗方法似乎对某些恙虫病东方体菌株无效。我们引入了一个数学模型，该模型可以近似恙虫病东方体在其自然宿主中的动态变化。在从提出的模型中计算出基本繁殖数后，我们探讨了它对可能受控制措施影响的参数值的敏感性。这个理论模型可能对害虫管理者以及关注通过更好地了解疾病的定性动态来加强对疾病的公共管理的卫生当局具有重要意义。
