Collaborative Research: IHBEM: Three-way coupling of water, behavior, and disease in the dynamics of mosquito-borne disease systems

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Complex behavioral responses to information from public health officials, social media, and elsewhere during the COVID-19 pandemic laid bare the limitations of the simplistic assumptions that epidemiological models have traditionally made about human behavior. The investigators of this project hypothesize that human behavior may also play a key role in why diseases transmitted by Aedes mosquitoes, such as dengue and Zika, have been so difficult to control. Aedes mosquitoes lay eggs in household water storage containers, meaning that behaviors related to water storage, water consumption, and water container management impact mosquito populations and, thereby, diseases transmitted by these mosquitoes. The central objective of this project is to understand how humans make decisions about preventive actions against Aedes-borne diseases and how those actions in turn affect disease dynamics and subsequent individual-level decision-making. The project will focus on the city of Ibagué, Colombia, where public health officials have long used behavioral approaches to intervene against Aedes-borne diseases. Empirical social science research will investigate how individuals respond to these interventions and characterize differences among individuals in their responses. Mathematical modeling research will estimate the effectiveness of these interventions at the population level. Throughout the project, a close connection with community members and local public health officials will be cultivated to ensure the effective translation of project outcomes. Training and capacity building activities will extend the impacts of the project to settings beyond Ibagué.This project aims to develop a mechanistic understanding of the role of behavior in infectious disease dynamics and mathematical modeling tools that are capable of accounting for those mechanisms, with the ultimate goal of enabling more effective use of public health interventions. The project will be grounded in empirical social science research in Ibagué, a city in Colombia with one of the highest urbanization rates and Aedes-borne disease transmission rates in the country. A combination of observational and experimental approaches will be used to characterize heterogeneity in the adoption of mosquito prevention behaviors in and around the home and to understand the cues that drive the adoption, or neglect, of those behaviors. These empirical findings will be used to develop a mathematical model of individual decision-making around the use of mosquito prevention behaviors in response to individual-level behavioral dispositions that change over time as cues arise and subside. This decision-making model will then be incorporated into an agent-based model of Aedes-borne disease transmission that will be used to infer the effectiveness of behavioral interventions that public health officials use to control Aedes-borne diseases in Ibagué. Finally, a suite of simpler macroscopic models will be developed and assessed with respect to their ability to capture effects of behavioral interventions on epidemiological dynamics simulated with the agent-based model. The ultimate outcome of the project will be the development and validation of minimally complex mathematical models that are capable of predicting responses of epidemiological dynamics to behavioral interventions.This project is jointly funded by the Division of Mathematical Sciences (DMS) in the Directorate of Mathematical and Physical Sciences (MPS), the Established Program to Stimulate Competitive Research (EPSCoR), and the Division of Social and Economic Sciences (SES) in the Directorate of Social, Behavioral and Economic Sciences (SBE).This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.