A Mathematical Model for Accessing Dengue Hemorrhagic Fever in Infants

Abstract

A mathematical model was developed to describe the dynamics of the primary infection of dengue virus in infants who were born to a mother immune to some serotype of the dengue virus. The model is given by a system of nonlinear ordinary differential equations with time-dependent variables for the number of dengue virus antibodies of the infant transferred from their immune, uninfected, and infected monocytes and dengue virus. The mathematical analysis was carried out where the conditions for the existence of the disease-free equilibrium and the endemic equilibrium were established. The numerical simulations were performed considering different scenarios for a basic reproductive number, R 0, illustrating the global convergence of the numerical results for the equilibrium points. The results are in agreement with our derived global stability analysis. It can be concluded that dengue hemorrhagic fever in infants could occur in the peaks observed for the infected monocytes and dengue virus.