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.