Threshold behaviour of a SI epidemiological model with two structuring variables
Résumé
In this article, we study a SI epidemic model describing the spread of a disease in a perfectly mixed
managed population, representing an animal herd in a fattening farm. The epidemic process is characterized
by a non-neglectable and variable incubation period, during which individuals are infectious but cannot be
easily detected. The susceptible and infected populations are structured according to age and, for infected,
to time remaining before the end of the incubation, where they show detectable clinical signs. We study
the well posedness and the asymptotic behaviour of the problem and show that in some cases, even if the
farm is fed with healthy animals, disease persistence can occur. We give an explicit formula for the basic
reproduction number R0 and the biological interpretation of this threshold on a specific example. We finally
illustrate the asymptotic behaviour of the model by numerical simulations.