Analysing the impact of migration on HIV/AIDS cases using epidemiological modelling to guide policy makers

Ofosuhene O Apenteng; Prince P Osei; Noor Azina Ismail; Aline Chiabai

doi:10.1016/j.idm.2022.01.002

Analysing the impact of migration on HIV/AIDS cases using epidemiological modelling to guide policy makers

Infect Dis Model. 2022 Jan 30;7(1):252-261. doi: 10.1016/j.idm.2022.01.002. eCollection 2022 Mar.

Authors

Ofosuhene O Apenteng¹, Prince P Osei^{2

3}, Noor Azina Ismail⁴, Aline Chiabai⁵

Affiliations

¹ Division for Global Surveillance, Research Group for Genomic Epidemiology, National Food Institute, Technical University of Denmark, Kongens Lyngby, Denmark.
² School of Mathematics and Statistics, Carleton University, Canada.
³ Department of Statistics, University of Haifa, Israel.
⁴ Department of Applied Statistics, Faculty of Economics and Administration, University of Malaya, Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia.
⁵ Basque Centre for Climate Change (BC3), Leioa, Spain.

Abstract

In this paper, we present the impact of migration on the spread of HIV and AIDS cases. A simple model for HIV and AIDS that incorporates migration and addresses its contributions to the spread of HIV and AIDS cases was constructed. The model was calibrated to HIV and AIDS incidence data from Malaysia. We explore the use of Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) simulation method to estimate uncertainty in all the unknown parameters incorporated in our proposed model. Among the migrant population, 1.5572e-01 were susceptible to HIV transmission, which constituted 67,801 migrants. A proportion of migrants, 6.3773e-04, were estimated to be HIV infected, constituting 278 migrants. There were 72 (per 10,000) migrants estimated to have had AIDS, representing a proportion of 1.6611e-08. The result suggests that the disease-free steady state was unstable since the estimated basic reproduction number $R_{0}$ was 2.0906 and 2.3322 for the models without and with migration, respectively. This is not a good indicator from the public health point of view, as the aim is to stabilize the epidemic at the disease-free equilibrium. The advantage of introduction of migration to the simple model validated the true $R_{0}$ and the transmission rate $β$ associated with HIV and AIDS epidemic disease in Malaysia. It also indicates an approximately 12 percentage points increase in the rate of HIV infection with migration.

Keywords: Basic reproduction number; HIV/AIDS; Mathematical transmission modeling; Migration; Parameter estimation.