Maternal passive immunity and dengue hemorrhagic fever in infants (Q2299340)

This paper studies a mathematical model assessing the role of maternal dengue-specific antibodies in the development of dengue hemorrhagic fever in infants. The model accounts for the biological mechanisms behind the antibody-dependent enhancement phenomena in infants and it describes some features including the initial concentration of maternal antibodies received by the infant at born, the strength of the competition between virus neutralization and infection enhancement promoted by antibody as well as the virus capability of infecting cells. It is shown that the solution are nonnegative and bounded on the interval \([0,+\infty)\). The existence of the equilibria of the system is discussed including local and global asymptotic stability stability of the disease-free steady state, and local asymptotic stability of the dengue hemorrhagic fever steady state. The disease-free steady is shown to be locally asymptotically stable if the basic reproduction is less than 1 and unstable if it is larger than 1. Numerical simulations are also provided to validate the theoretical results.