ON THE BASIC REPRODUCTION NUMBER OF LASSA FEVER EPIDEMICS AND ITS RELATIONSHIP WITH INTER-EPIDEMIC PERIOD

Résumé

Lassa fever is a deadly disease transmitted through ingestion of food that is contaminated with infected rodent’s saliva, urine or excreta, infected person and inhalation of the aerosol. In this paper, we present a novel mathematical model that accounted for all the known Lassa fever transmission routes. We derived the basic reproduction number for the model and estimated the inter-epidemic period of infection disease. The goal of this paper is to find the relationship between the Lassa fever basic reproduction number and inter-epidemic period of infection disease. It was found that the basic reproduction number is inversely proportional to the square of inter-epidemic period of an infectious disease. Therefore, any policy or measures taken to reduce the basic reproduction number will definitely make the disease to take a very long time to re-emerge.