A Compartmental Model for Rabies Transmission with Behavioral Interventions: Vaccination and Public Awareness

Abstract

Rabies remains one of the most lethal zoonotic diseases, causing tens of thousands of human deaths annually, the overwhelming majority transmitted through bites from infected domestic dogs. Conventional epidemic models of rabies treat vaccination coverage and human care-seeking behaviour as fixed parameters, yet in practice both are shaped dynamically by community awareness and campaign investment. In this paper we develop and analyse a nine-dimensional human–dog compartmental model in which dog vaccination uptake, human post-exposure prophylaxis (PEP) uptake, and bite-avoidance behaviour are all coupled to a time-evolving behavioural awareness variableA(t). We establish positivity and boundedness of solutions, derive the disease-free equilibrium, and use the next-generation matrix approach to obtain a closed-form basic reproduction number R_0 that depends explicitly on the awareness-driven vaccination rate. Local stability of the disease-free equilibrium is established for R_0<1. A normalized forward sensitivity analysis identifies the dog-to-dog transmission rate and the disease-induced death rate in dogs as the most influential parameters, followed by the awareness-driven vaccination gain. Numerical simulations contrasting a low-awareness baseline against an active behavioural-intervention scenario show that sustained investment in public awareness campaigns can suppress R_0 from above unity to below unity, collapse the peak of infectious dogs, and reduce human rabies deaths by more than an order of magnitude. We conclude with policy recommendations for integrating behavioural-communication investment into dog-mediated rabies elimination programmes