How public reaction to disease information across scales and the impacts of vector control methods influence disease prevalence and control efficacy.

With the development of social media, the information about vector-borne disease incidence over broad spatial scales can cause demand for local vector control before local risk exists. Anticipatory intervention may still benefit local disease control efforts; however, infection risks are not the only focal concerns governing public demand for vector control. Concern for environmental contamination from pesticides and economic limitations on the frequency and magnitude of control measures also play key roles. Further, public concern may be focused more on ecological factors (i.e., controlling mosquito populations) or on epidemiological factors (i.e., controlling infection-carrying mosquitoes), which may lead to very different control outcomes. Here we introduced a generic Ross-MacDonald model, incorporating these factors under three spatial scales of disease information: local, regional, and global. We tailored and parameterized the model for Zika virus transmitted by Aedes aegypti mosquito. We found that sensitive reactivity caused by larger-scale incidence information could decrease average human infections per patch breeding capacity, however, the associated increase in total control effort plays a larger role, which leads to an overall decrease in control efficacy. The shift of focal concerns from epidemiological to ecological risk could relax the negative effect of the sensitive reactivity on control efficacy when mosquito breeding capacity populations are expected to be large. This work demonstrates that, depending on expected total mosquito breeding capacity population size, and weights of different focal concerns, large-scale disease information can reduce disease infections without lowering control efficacy. Our findings provide guidance for vector-control strategies by considering public reaction through social media. Author summary: With the development of modern technologies (e.g., social/mass media platforms), people can access disease information across counties, states, or entire nations. This wider access to information about (potentially remote) disease risks can motivate local citizenry to demand rapid action to prevent/control exposure. In some cases, this demand may be mismatched with actual risk (e.g., to enact control before disease is present locally, or disproportionately to current prevalence). This paper first provides a systematic study about the influences of larger-scale disease information on local-scale infection dynamics and control effort and efficacy through a case study of Zika virus. We find that larger-scale information often decreases local outbreak size. We find that the impact of information on control efficacy depends on available vector breeding habitat. This study demonstrates the importance of including likely public reaction to information about disease across spatial and temporal scales into the design and implementation of disease control strategies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]