The Impact of Human Mobility on HIV Transmission in Kenya

Disease spreads as a result of people moving and coming in contact with each other. Thus the mobility patterns of individuals are crucial in understanding disease dynamics. Here we study the impact of human mobility on HIV transmission in different parts of Kenya. 

We build an SIR metapopulation model that incorporates the different regions within the country. We parameterise the model using census data, HIV data and mobile phone data adopted to track human mobility. We found that movement between different regions appears to have a relatively small overall effect on the total increase in HIV cases in Kenya. However, the most important consequence of movement patterns was transmission of the disease from high infection to low prevalence areas. 

Mobility slightly increases HIV incidence rates in regions with initially low HIV prevalences and slightly decreases incidences in regions with initially high HIV prevalence. We discuss how regional HIV models could be used in public-health planning. This paper is a first attempt to model spread of HIV using mobile phone data, and we also discuss limitations to the approach.

Below:  (a) Map of Kenya showing HIV prevalence distributions. The color bar from blue to red is in the order of increasing HIV prevalence. For clarity, the names of counties included are the only ones included in this study (Source of data:ArcGIS.com: shapefile-The 47 counties of Kenya (shapefile by dmuthami S5 Table) and HIV data from [39]. (b) Human travel networks (S6 Table) as estimated by [38]. Monthly average number of trips per 1000 individuals between all pairs of regions over the course of the year. For clarity, only trips made per 1000 individuals that are more than 60 trips per year are shown, with arrows indicating the direction of movements from home region to a visited region. The thickness of the arrow represents the number of trips made.

Full article at:  http://goo.gl/CNJrDs

By:   

Augustino Isdory, Eunice W. Mureithi

Department of Mathematics, University of Dar es Salaam, Dar es Salaam, Tanzania

David J. T. Sumpter

Department of Mathematics, Uppsala University, Uppsala, Sweden

 

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