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Recently, promising clinical advances have been made in the development of antimalarial drugs that block the parasite transmission and also cures the disease and has prophylactic effects, called transmission-blocking drugs (TBDs). Our main aim is to explore the potential effects of TBDs on malaria transmission in the effort to control and eliminate the disease using mathematical models to ascertain how the presence of TBDs can mitigate the transmission of malaria parasites on both asymptomatic and symptomatic carriers in a defined hotspot of malaria. Our special focus is on the effects of the treatment coverage and the efficacy of TBDs along with the protective effect and waning effect of TBDs. For this, we propose and analyze a mathematical model for malaria transmission dynamics that extends the SEIRS-SEI type model to include a class of humans who are undergoing the treatment with TBDs and a class of those who are protected because of successful treatment. The mathematical and epidemiological implications of the TBDs are assessed using different approaches. Furthermore, we fit the model to malaria data using the libraray "lmfit” in python, and use the validated model to explore the model's predictions under various scenarios. Results from our analysis show that the effect of treatment coverage rate on reducing reproduction number depends on other key parameters such as the efficacy of the drug. The projections of the validated model show the benefits of using TBDs in malaria control in preventing new cases and reducing mortality.

This work is co-authored with Jacek Banasiak and Rachid Ouifki.

Dr Woldegebriel Assefa is a newer faculty member and Assistant Professor at the Department of Mathematics and Statistics at York University as of July 2021. Prior to this appointment he was a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the in Mathematical Models and Methods in Biosciences and Bioengineering Lab at the University of Pretoria, South Africa. He obtained his Ph.D. from the University of Buea, Cameroon in a collaboration with Lehigh University in the USA. He has two master’s degrees: one from the African Institute for Mathematical Sciences (AIMS) with a master thesis in partial differential equations, and a second master of science degree from Addis Ababa University in Ethiopia in Functional Analysis.

Previously he was an Assistant professor at Mekelle University in Ethiopia for one year; as a Predoctoral Research Associate at Lehigh University in the USA; as an Assistant Lecturer at the University of Pretoria in South Africa, and as Teaching Assistant at AIMS.

Research interests: mathematical immunology, in-host modelling, epidemiological modelling, modelling impact of climate change on infectious disease dynamics, data analysis in Python, and enthusiastic to diversify his research to Neural differential equations.