No abstract

Cholera, characterized by severe diarrhea and rapid dehydration, is a water-borne infectious disease caused by the bacterium Vibrio cholerae. Haiti offers the most recent example of the tragedy that can befall a country and its people when cholera strikes. While cholera has been a recognized disease for two centuries, there is no strategy for its effective control. We formulate and analyze a mathematical model that includes two essential and affordable control measures: water chlorination and education. We calculate the basic reproduction number and determine the global stability of the disease-free equilibrium for the model without chlorination. We use Latin Hypercube Sampling to demonstrate that the model is most sensitive to education. We also derive the minimal effective chlorination period required to control the disease for both fixed and variable chlorination. Numerical simulations suggest that education is more effective than chlorination in decreasing bacteria and the number of cholera cases.

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We study a mixed boundary value problem for the quasilinear elliptic equation div A(x, ∇u(x)) = 0 in an open infinite circular half-cylinder with prescribed continuous Dirichlet data on a part of the boundary and zero conormal derivative on the rest. We prove the existence and uniqueness of bounded weak solutions to the mixed problem and characterize the regularity of the point at infinity in terms of p-capacities. For solutions with only Neumann data near the point at infinity we show that they behave in exactly one of three possible ways, similar to the alternatives in the Phragmén-Lindelöf principle.