The impact of vaccination on human papillomavirus infection with disassortative geographical mixing: a two-patch modeling study (Q2133939)

This paper is concerned with the dynamics of HPV transmission, with focus on sexual mixing and vaccine distribution. The authors develop a two-patch two-sex deterministic model to evaluate the impact of disassortative geographical mixing and HPV vaccine allocation in a heterosexually active population. Both the basic reproduction number and the control reproduction number \(R_0\) under vaccination are obtained. The stability of the disease-free equilibria is investigated, showing that \(R_0\) provides a critical threshold for disease elimination. Both analytical and numerical results show that disassortative geographical mixing does not affect \(R_0\) and only has a minor impact on the disease prevalence in the total population given the vaccine uptake proportional to the population size for each gender in the two patches. When the vaccine uptake is not proportional to the population size, sexual mixing between the two patches can reduce \(R_0\) and mitigate the consequence of disproportionate vaccine coverage. The authors find that if the two patches have the same or similar sex ratios, allocating vaccines proportionally according to the new recruits in two patches and giving priority to the gender with a smaller recruit rate within each patch will bring the maximum benefit in reducing the total prevalence. This study provides some quantitative information that may help to develop vaccine distribution strategies in multiple regions with disassortative mixing and reduce the disease prevalence.