Matching Items (2)
Description
Rabies disease remains enzootic among raccoons, skunks, foxes and bats in the United States. It is of primary concern for public-health agencies to control spatial spread of rabies in wildlife and its potential spillover infection of domestic animals and humans. Rabies is invariably fatal in wildlife if untreated, with a non-negligible incubation period. Understanding how this latency affects spatial spread of rabies in wildlife is the concern of chapter 2 and 3. Chapter 1 deals with the background of mathematical models for rabies and lists main objectives. In chapter 2, a reaction-diffusion susceptible-exposed-infected (SEI) model and a delayed diffusive susceptible-infected (SI) model are constructed to describe the same epidemic process -- rabies spread in foxes. For the delayed diffusive model a non-local infection term with delay is resulted from modeling the dispersal during incubation stage. Comparison is made regarding minimum traveling wave speeds of the two models, which are verified using numerical experiments. In chapter 3, starting with two Kermack and McKendrick's models where infectivity, death rate and diffusion rate of infected individuals can depend on the age of infection, the asymptotic speed of spread $c^\ast$ for the cumulated force of infection can be analyzed. For the special case of fixed incubation period, the asymptotic speed of spread is governed by the same integral equation for both models. Although explicit solutions for $c^\ast$ are difficult to obtain, assuming that diffusion coefficient of incubating animals is small, $c^\ast$ can be estimated in terms of model parameter values. Chapter 4 considers the implementation of realistic landscape in simulation of rabies spread in skunks and bats in northeast Texas. The Finite Element Method (FEM) is adopted because the irregular shapes of realistic landscape naturally lead to unstructured grids in the spatial domain. This implementation leads to a more accurate description of skunk rabies cases distributions.
ContributorsLiu, Hao (Author) / Kuang, Yang (Thesis advisor) / Jackiewicz, Zdzislaw (Committee member) / Lanchier, Nicolas (Committee member) / Smith, Hal (Committee member) / Thieme, Horst (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2013
Description
The purpose of this study was to analyze the effectiveness of a community-based rabies education program as a means to improve knowledge and awareness of rabies in rural, underprivileged areas. Using a non-randomized pre-test and post-test design (see Appendix A), community leaders and government officials within Gila County participated in a training on rabies prevention. Results were drawn through analyzing two education-based interventions held in Globe and Payson within Gila County. The descriptive statistics run within the Wilcoxon Signed-Rank Test indicated that Question 10 was significant because it fell out of the normal distribution category for both Globe and Payson (Tables 3 and 4). The Wilcoxon Signed-Rank Test indicated that Question 9 was significant for both Globe and Payson because it was below the .05 significance level (Tables 5 and 6). Finally, the Pearson’s Correlation Coefficient also indicated that Question 9 was significant for both Globe and Payson since their values were below the .05 significance level. The repetition of Questions 9 and 10 being significant for each test represent that prominent sources of animals spreading rabies in Arizona and how different areas are affected by rabies in Arizona are areas for future studies to focus on. Given that the amount of knowledge gained was not consistent amongst participants nor groups, even when the population was targeted to be similar, it was concluded that education-based interventions are selectively effective at increasing knowledge and awareness of rabies.
ContributorsSwette, Anna (Author) / Savaglio, Lauren (Thesis director) / Beck, Joshua (Committee member) / College of Health Solutions (Contributor) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor)
Created2019-05