The Scientific World Journal

Volume 2014 (2014), Article ID 409730, 14 pages

http://dx.doi.org/10.1155/2014/409730

Research Article

Traveling Wave Solutions for Epidemic Cholera Model with Disease-Related Death

Tianran Zhang¹ and Qingming Gou²

¹School of Mathematics and Statistics, Southwest University, Chongqing 400715, China

²College of Mathematics & Computer Science, Yangtze Normal University, Chongqing 408100, China

Received 2 January 2014; Accepted 10 March 2014; Published 27 April 2014

Academic Editors: M. Han, Z. Jin, and Y. Xia

Copyright © 2014 Tianran Zhang and Qingming Gou. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

Abstract.

Based on Codeço’s cholera model (2001), an epidemic cholera model that incorporates the pathogen diffusion and disease-related death is proposed. The formula for minimal wave speed is given. To prove the existence of traveling wave solutions, an invariant cone is constructed by upper and lower solutions and Schauder’s fixed point theorem is applied. The nonexistence of traveling wave solutions is proved by two-sided Laplace transform. However, to apply two-sided Laplace transform, the prior estimate of exponential decrease of traveling wave solutions is needed. For this aim, a new method is proposed, which can be applied to reaction-diffusion systems consisting of more than three equations.

1. Introduction

In the past and at present, cholera has been a serious threat to human health, which is an acute, diarrheal illness caused by infection of the intestine with the bacterium Vibrio cholera. An estimated 3–5 million cases and over 100,000 deaths occur each year around the world [1]. The cholera bacterium is usually found in water or food sources that have been contaminated by feces from a person infected with cholera. Cholera is most likely to be found and spread in places with inadequate water treatment, poor sanitation, and inadequate hygiene. Therefore, cholera outbreaks have been occurring in developing countries—for example, Iraq (2007-2008), Guinea Bissau (2008), Zimbabwe (2008-2009), Haiti (2010), Democratic Republic of Congo (2011-2012), and Sierra Leone (2012) [2].

Many mathematical models were proposed to understand the propagation mechanism of cholera, the earlier one of which was established by Capasso and Paveri-Fontana [3] to study the 1973 cholera epidemic in the Mediterranean region as follows:

where and denote the concentrations of the pathogen and the infective populations, respectively. In addition, Codeço [4] investigated the role of the aquatic pathogen in dynamics of cholera through the following susceptible-infective-pathogen mode:

where is the susceptible individuals. In this model, human is divided into two groups: the susceptible and the infective. As pointed out in [4–8], bacterium Vibrio cholera can spread by direct human-to-human and indirect environment-to-human modes. To understand the complex dynamics of cholera, model (2) is extended by [6, 9–15], and so forth.

In all previous models, the influences of space distribution of human on the transmission of cholera are omitted. Cholera usually spreads in spacial wave [16]. Cholera bacteria live in rivers and interact with the plankton on the surface of the water [17]. When individuals drink contaminated water and are infected, then they will release cholera bacteria through excretion [18]. Capasso et al. [19–22] developed model (1) by incorporating the bacterium diffusion in a bounded area and studied the existence and stability of solutions. To deeply investigate the interaction of transmission modes and bacterium diffusion, Bertuzzo et al. [23, 24] incorporated patchy structure into model (2) and supposed that the pathogen in water could diffuse among these patches. Furthermore, Mari et al. [25] studied the influence of diffusion of both human and pathogen on cholera dynamics through a patchy model.

Infectious case usually is found firstly at some location and then spreads to other areas. Consequently, the most important question for cholera is as follows: what is the spreading speed of cholera? However, the above spacial models mainly focus on the stability of solutions, not the spreading speed. Traveling wave solution is an important tool used to study the spreading speed of infectious diseases [26–28]. Based on Capasso’s model (1), Zhao and Wang [29], Xu and Zhao [30], Jin and Zhao [31], and Hsu and Yang [32] studied the influences of pathogen diffusion on the spread speed of cholera.

In above diffusive cholera models, diffusion of aquatic pathogen is neglected. In this paper, we investigate the effects of the disease-related death and aquatic pathogen in cholera epidemic dynamics by developing model (2). Based on model (2) and ignoring natural birth and death, a general diffusive epidemic cholera model incorporating the disease-related death and aquatic pathogen dynamics can be formulated as the following reaction-diffusion system:

where and denote the concentrations of susceptible and infected individuals, respectively, and is the concentration of the infectious agents. is the disease-related death rate, denotes the contribution of each infected person to the concentration of cholera, and is the net death rate of the vibrio. is the environment-to-human transmission incidence. Similar to [15], we assume that satisfies

(A1), , , for .

From hypothesis (A1), we have .

In this paper, we study the traveling wave solutions of model (3). The formula for minimal wave speed is given. To prove the existence of traveling wave solutions for , an invariant cone is constructed and Schauder’s fixed point theorem is introduced. Schauder’s fixed point theorem is applied widely to prove the existence of traveling wave solutions (e.g., [26, 33, 34]). However, unlike Wang and Wu [34], the cone in our paper is bounded. Motivated by [34–37], we prove the nonexistence of traveling wave solutions for by two-sided Laplace transform, which was firstly introduced to prove the nonexistence of traveling wave solutions by Carr and Chmaj [37] and then was applied by [34–36]. To apply two-sided Laplace transform, the exponential decrease of traveling wave solutions is needed, which is proved in [34] by analysis method. However, it cannot be applied to our model due to the nonlinearity of cholera incidence. Therefore, in this paper, a new method is proposed to get the exponential decrease of traveling wave solutions, which is inspired by the proof of Stable Manifold Theorem in [38]. In addition, our method can be applied to reaction-diffusion systems consisting of more than three equations.

This paper is organized as follows. Section 2 is focused on the existence of traveling wave solutions. Firstly, the existence of traveling wave solutions for original system is proved to be equivalent to that of a new simple system. Then, two pairs of upper and lower solutions are constructed to get an invariant cone and Schauder’s fixed point theorem is applied for new system. Section 3 is devoted to the nonexistence of traveling wave solutions. For this aim, a new method is proposed to show the exponential decrease of traveling wave solutions and two-sided Laplace transform is used.

2. Existence of Traveling Wave Solutions

For convenience in discussing the model, we introduce dimensionless variables and parameters. Setting

we obtain

where

Obviously, also satisfies assumption (A1) with being replaced by a new constant .

A traveling wave solution of system (5) is a nonnegative nontrivial solution of the form

satisfying boundary condition

where .

Before giving the main theorem, we introduce the equation for minimal wave speed:

where

The main result of this section is given as follows.

Theorem 1. Suppose . Then, there exists a positive constant which is the only positive root of (9). For any , system (5) has a traveling wave solution satisfying boundary condition (8) such that is nonincreasing in . Furthermore, one has that

To study the existence of traveling wave solutions, using constant variation method in the second equation of (5) gives

Then, system (5) changes into

Lemma 2. is a traveling wave solution of system (13) satisfying boundary condition

if and only if is a traveling wave solution of system (5) satisfying boundary condition (8), where

Proof. Assume is a traveling wave solution of system (13) satisfying boundary condition (14). Obviously, is a solution of system (5). To prove the necessity, it is enough to show that . Consider

where the third equality is due to L’Hopital principal. The sufficiency is clear and is omitted. The proof is completed.

From Lemma 2, we only need to study traveling wave solutions of (13) satisfying boundary condition (14). Substituting traveling profile

into system (13) yields the following equations:

where denotes the derivative with respect to .

In the following, we will use Schauder’s fixed point theorem to prove the existence of traveling wave solutions. To achieve this goal, we firstly linearize the second equation of (18) at and obtain

Substituting into (19), we get the characteristic equation

that is,

where , , and . To investigate distribution of roots of (21), denote

and introduce the following lemma [39].

Lemma 3. (a) If , (21) has one real root and two nonreal complex conjugate roots.

(b) If , (21) has a multiple root and all its roots are real.

(c) If , (21) has three distinct real roots.

Then, we get the following lemma about the distribution of eigenvalues.

Lemma 4. Assume . Then, there exists a constant which is the only positive root of (9) such that

(a)if , (21) has a negative real root and two nonreal complex conjugate roots with positive real parts;(b)if , (21) has a negative real root and a positive real multiple root;(c)if , (21) has a negative real root and two different positive real roots;(d)one can assume and let be the two positive roots of (21); then if .

Proof. Obviously, , , and . By Descartes’ rule of signs, has only one positive root such that for and for . Direct calculations show that . Since and , Descartes’ rule of signs shows that (21) has only one negative real root and Routh-Hurwitz criterion indicates that (21) has roots with positive real parts. Then, the combination of Lemma 3 and above analysis completes the proof of (a)–(c). (d) is obviously true, since is a cubic polynomial.

In this section, we always suppose and unless other conditions are specified. Denote to be the two positive roots of (21) and define

where , .

Lemma 5. The function satisfies inequality

for any .

Proof. Firstly, assume and, therefore, . Since satisfies (19) and for any , we have

where .

Secondly, set , which implies . We have that

The proof is completed.

Lemma 6. For sufficiently small and sufficiently large, the function satisfies

for any .

Proof. Let be sufficiently large to ensure . When , then and the lemma is obviously true. Now, suppose . Then, and

where . Let . Since

we can find sufficiently small and sufficiently large such that

Thus, the proof is completed.

Lemma 7. Let . Then, for large enough, the function satisfies

for any .

Proof. It is clear that if and only if , that if and only if , and that if and only if . Let . When , then , , and Lemma 7 holds.

In this paragraph, assume . Then, , , and . To prove this lemma, it is enough to show

where . Since

we only need to show

Since , then

Since , inequality (34) satisfies if

The proof is completed.

To apply Schauder’s fixed point theorem, we will introduce a topology in . Let be a positive constant which will be specified in the following. For , define

We will find traveling wave solutions in the following profile set:

Obviously, is closed and convex in . Firstly, we change system (18) into the following form:

where ,

Suppose are the two roots of equation . Furthermore, define by

In the remainder of this paper, it is always assumed that .

Lemma 8. Consider .

Proof. Let ; that is , . Then, we need to prove that

First of all, we have

From Lemma 6 and system (39), we get

where the second inequality is due to . Then,

Therefore, we have proved .

Now, we study . If , then , which implies that since , . Assume . From Lemma 7 and system (39), it is clear that

which implies

where the final inequality is due to and . In conclusion, for any .

Similarly, we can show and the proof is completed.

Lemma 9. Map is continuous with respect to the norm in .

Proof. For , we have

where , and is between and . Therefore, we have

Then,

Thus, when , we get

When , it follows that

Consequently, we have proved that

for any , where

That is,

In conclusion, is continuous with respect to the norm in .

In addition, consider . Firstly, we have

where . Therefore,

If , it holds that

If , we have

Consequently, we conclude that

where

Thus, is continuous with respect to the norm in . The proof is completed.

Lemma 10. Map is compact with respect to the norm in .

Proof. For any , it is clear that

Since , we have

which implies that  . Since , we get

Then,

which implies that. Consequently, and are bounded, which shows that is uniformly bounded and equicontinuous with respect to the norm in .

Furthermore, for any positive integer , define

Obviously, for fixed , is uniformly bounded and equicontinuous with respect to the norm in , which implies that is a compact operator. Since

we have that

Similarly, we can prove that when . Thus, when . By Proposition 2.1 in Zeilder [40], we have that converges to in with respect to the norm . Consequently, is compact with respect to the norm . The proof is completed.

Proof of Theorem 1. Combination of Schauder’s fixed point theorem and Lemmas 8, 9, and 10 shows that there exists a nonnegative traveling wave solution such that when . By the definition of and , there is a such that and when . Therefore, if , we have that which implies that . It is clear that is nonincreasing in .

From Lemma 2 and system (18), it follows that

By the first and second equation of (69), we have

Since the traveling wave solution and is the fixed point of the operator , thus . The proof of Lemma 10 shows that is bounded. Using L’Hopital principal shows that

Integrating the third equation of (69) from to yields

Then, the boundedness of and implies , which shows that and .

Next, we prove , which is motivated by Wang and Wu [34]. Define

It is clear that satisfies

, and . Denote , which satisfies

Due to , it follows that

which implies that is nondecreasing in . Since and , we have for all . The proof is completed.

3. Nonexistence of Traveling Wave Solutions

In this section, we give the conditions on which system (5) has no traveling wave solutions.

Theorem 11. (I) Assume . Then, for any , system (5) has no nonnegative nontrivial traveling wave solutions satisfying boundary condition (8).

(II) Suppose . Then, for any , system (5) has no traveling wave solutions satisfying boundary condition (8).

To prove (I) by two-sided Laplace transform, the following lemma about the exponential decrease of traveling wave solutions is needed.

Lemma 12. Assume . If is a nonnegative nontrivial traveling wave solution of (5) satisfying boundary condition (8), there exists a positive constant such that

Proof. Substituting traveling wave profile

into the second and third equations of (5), it follows that

Setting , we have

Furthermore, system (80) can be written as

where

and . Obviously, . Since

and is bounded in , for any small constant , there exists such that

for all .

Since is the solution of (79) if and only if is the solution of (79) for any and they satisfy the same boundary condition at , we can select large such that (84) holds with and being replaced by . Therefore, we suppose .

Calculations show that the eigenfunction of is defined by (21). Then, by Lemma 4, there exists constant matrix such that

where and the eigenvalues , of matrix have positive real parts. Setting , the system (81) then has the form

Obviously, and satisfies (84). Denote

Then, , , and

It is not difficult to see that we can choose positive constants and such that

It is clear that (86) is equivalent to

where

Since , then multiplying the first equality of (90) by and setting yield

or

Thus, (90) has the form

where .

To study the properties of , we need to construct a functional sequence. Define

for . Obviously, we have

for any . Assume that the induction hypothesis

holds for and . Then, using the condition (84) satisfied by the function , it follows from the induction hypothesis that for we have

Setting yields

It then follows by induction that (97) holds for all and . Thus, for any and , we have

which implies that is a Cauchy sequence of continuous functions. It follows that

uniformly for all . Taking the limit of both sides of (95), it follows from the uniform convergence that the continuous function satisfies the integral equation (94). Then, the uniqueness of solution of (94) implies . Consequently, (97) and

show that

for any . Since , it follows . Thus,

and the proof is completed.

Proof of Theorem 11(I). Assume (5) has a traveling wave solution satisfying boundary condition (8). From the first equation of (18), it follows

By Lemma 12, there exists a positive constant such that

For , define two-sided Laplace transform as follows:

Obviously, there exists and is increasing in such that satisfying or .

Furthermore, we have

The second equality of (18) can be rewritten as

where

Denote , from which it follows that . Since satisfies hypothesis (A1), we have for any .

Taking two-sided Laplace transform of (109), we have

If , it is clear that . Since

Lemma 12, inequality (106), and imply . However, Lemma 4 shows that , which contradicts (111). Hence, we have . Furthermore, (111) can be rewritten as

Since , it is impossible that the above equality holds, again a contradiction.

Proof of Theorem 11(II). Suppose is a traveling wave solution of system (5) satisfying boundary condition (8). Then, by the proof of Theorem 1, it is clear that . Furthermore,

which is a contradiction. The proof is completed.

Conflict of Interests

The authors declare that there is no conflict of interests regarding the publication of this paper.

Acknowledgments

The authors are supported by the Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities (XDJK2012C042) and NSFC Grants (11201380).

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