Can community-based care and environmental disinfection mitigate the pneumonia burden?

Sigauke, Morelyn, Njagarah, Hatson John Boscoh, Kassa, Semu Mitiku and Szomolay, Barbara ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-5375-5533 2025. Can community-based care and environmental disinfection mitigate the pneumonia burden? Journal of Biological Systems 10.1142/s0218339025500184

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Abstract

Pneumonia is one of the major causes of death among children under five years of age and adults over 65, with more than 2 million deaths occurring in developing countries every year. The efforts for early detection, effective treatment, and minimizing the transmission of pneumonia are possible if the dynamics of the disease are well understood. In most countries or communities, hospitals have limited capacity to accommodate those who are sick. Therefore, individuals can be treated as outpatients or in community-based care depending on the severity of the infection. In this research, a model for the transmission dynamics of pneumonia is developed to determine the effect of disinfecting the pathogen-contaminated environment, and community-based care on the disease mitigation process. The basic properties of the model including positivity and boundedness, the basic reproduction number ([Formula: see text]), existence and stability of equilibria were determined as well as the conditions for existence of backward bifurcation, a scenario where reducing [Formula: see text] below 1 may not be enough to eradicate the disease. Sensitivity analysis was performed using the Latin Hypercube Sampling Scheme to determine the parameters with the greatest influence on the reproduction number. The results revealed that transmission rate through the contaminated environment and contact rate through person-to-person have the most significant potential of increasing the disease burden if unabated, while effective treatment and increased decay rate of microbes from the environment have the greatest potential of containing the number of infections. Numerical simulations were performed to illustrate the analytical results as well as establish the long-term behavior of the disease. It was observed that introducing community-based care can accelerate the containment of the disease as well as reducing the number of deaths in the population. In addition, a higher frequency of environmental disinfection is associated with lower infection cases not only around the peaks but also in the long term. We recommend that the community-based care be enhanced in the disease management process to cater for settings where resources are limited. To ensure proper implementation of community-based care services, training of community-based caregivers on the transmission dynamics of the disease, its management and prevention strategies is mandatory. More still, practicing proper hygiene, and applying multiple combinations of control measures including vaccination and isolation of the infected is essential if the disease is to be contained in a shorter time.

Item Type:	Article
Date Type:	Published Online
Status:	In Press
Schools:	Schools > Medicine
Publisher:	World Scientific Publishing
ISSN:	0218-3390
Date of Acceptance:	22 December 2024
Last Modified:	11 Mar 2025 11:00
URI:	https://orca.cardiff.ac.uk/id/eprint/176802

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