Modeling hantavirus infections in mainland China

Since the repeated outbreaks of hantavirus infections have been reported in mainland China, especially in Shannxi province, they have led to public concern and controlling the spread of hantavirus becomes challenging. To understand the transmission dynamics of hantaviruses and identify the key factors that significantly affect hemorrhagic fever with renal syndrome (HFRS) infections, we propose a periodic dynamic model, which representing seasonal variation of mice population and related transmission. The model does include the dynamics of field mice and house mice with their contaminated environments and the dynamics of human, in which indirect transmission between human and mice via contaminated environment is involved. We analyzed the periodic system and examined the threshold dynamics. We obtained the basic reproduction number R₀ for the periodic system, and proved that the disease-free periodic solution is globally asymptotically stable if R₀ < 1 and the hantavirus infections uniformly persist in human population for R₀ > 1. By fitting data on HFRS cases in the province of Shaanxi from 2006 to 2012 to our proposed model, we were able to obtain estimates of the unknown parameter values, we further use the case data from 2013 to 2016 to verify the formulated model. We obtain the basic reproduction numbers for HFRS infection as R₀=1.01. The finding indicated that immune strategy, cleaning environment and limiting contact with mice are important measures to reduce HFRS infections.