Pauline van den Driessche

Modeling the Spread of West Nile Virus

West Nile virus is a vector disease maintained in a mosquito bird cycle

with humans as dead end hosts. To model the recent spatial spread of West

Nile virus across North America, a reaction diffusion model is developed

with cross infection between birds and mosquitoes. A simplified version of

the model is analyzed, then comparison theorems used to give a biologically

reasonable upper bound on the spread rate of the more complex model.