Mathematical Modeling of Buffer Zone Design to Prevent Mosquito Migration

Mosquito-borne diseases, such as Dengue fever and malaria, are responsible for over 700,000 deaths annually and lead to a high disease burden worldwide. Releasing Wolbachia-infected male mosquitoes to suppress the wild mosquito population is a novel strategy in the control of mosquito-borne diseases. However, mosquitoes that migrate from outside can affect the suppression effect in the release zone. Therefore, it is necessary to set up buffer zones around the protected area to maintain mosquito control effectiveness. In this work, we first evaluate the threshold dynamics of three candidate mosquito-control strategies within a closed system. Building upon these basic dynamics, our core contribution is the development of a continuous-time spatial multi-patch model to investigate how we can optimally combine and deploy these strategies in buffer zones to block continuous mosquito invasion. We also provide numerical simulations to verify our theoretical results.