Effect of awareness program in disease outbreak - A slow-fast dynamics

The interplay between the impact of awareness and the disease outbreak through network epidemic models and non-network epidemic models have recently received considerable attention to the researchers. The present study falls under the non-network epidemic models. Human awareness results in the reduction of susceptibility to infection, naturally, in the epidemiological study this factor should be included. The demographic and epidemic processes are comparatively slow in compared with the awareness. In this work, we investigate the effect of awareness program in disease outbreak - a slow fast dynamics with an SIS (susceptible-infected-susceptible) model. We assume that susceptible individual switches between aware and unaware states very fast, whereas the disease transmission and other biological processes are comparatively slow. Our theoretical and numerical simulation results suggest that increase in switching ratio and lower infectivity among aware susceptible population drastically reduce the disease prevalence. We believe this finding may be useful in disease control programs. (C) 2014 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.