In this paper, we reflect upon control intervention practices habitually exerted by healthcare authorities in tropical areas that suffer from incidental outbreaks of dengue fever, in particular, the city of Cali, Colombia. Such control interventions, principally based on the insecticide spraying, are carried out sporadically in order to overcome an ongoing epidemic or at least to reduce its size. It is worth pointing out that control actions of this type do not usually account for sufficient budget because epidemic outbreaks are difficult to predict. In practical terms, these occasional control interventions are performed by spraying, as quickly as possible, all existing stock of insecticide (regardless of its lethality) and employing all available manpower. The goal of this paper is to design better strategies for insecticide‐based control actions, which are capable of preventing more human infections at no additional cost, and to reveal the obsolescence of current vector eradication practices. Our approach relies on dynamic optimization, where the number of averted human infections is maximized under budget constraint and subject to a simple dengue transmission model amended with one control variable that stands for the insecticide spraying. As a result, we obtain structurally robust control intervention policies that demonstrate better performance and higher resilience to possible budget limitations than traditional modus operandi.

中文翻译：

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在资源有限的情况下对登革热疫情的最佳控制

在本文中，我们反思了医疗机构在热带地区遭受登革热偶然爆发的习惯性控制干预措施，特别是在哥伦比亚卡利市。这种控制干预主要是基于喷洒杀虫剂而进行的，目的是克服流行病或至少减小其规模。值得指出的是，由于难以预测流行病的爆发，这种类型的控制行动通常不会占足够的预算。实际上，这些偶然的控制干预措施是通过尽快喷洒所有现有杀虫剂库存（无论其杀伤力如何）并利用所有可用人力来进行的。本文的目的是为基于杀虫剂的控制措施设计更好的策略，该策略能够在不增加成本的情况下预防更多的人类感染，并揭示当前媒介消灭方法的过时情况。我们的方法依赖于动态优化，在预算约束下，可以避免人类感染的数量最大化，并且要经过简单的登革热传播模型的修正，该模型用一个代表杀虫剂喷雾的控制变量进行了修正。结果，我们获得了结构稳健的控制干预政策，这些政策与传统方法相比，表现出更好的性能和对可能的预算限制的抵御能力 我们的方法依赖于动态优化，在预算约束下，可以避免人类感染的数量最大化，并且要经过简单的登革热传播模型的修正，该模型用一个代表杀虫剂喷雾的控制变量进行了修正。结果，我们获得了结构稳健的控制干预政策，这些政策与传统方法相比，表现出更好的性能和对可能的预算限制的抵御能力 我们的方法依赖于动态优化，在预算约束下，可以避免人类感染的数量最大化，并且要经过简单的登革热传播模型的修正，该模型用一个代表杀虫剂喷雾的控制变量进行了修正。结果，我们获得了结构稳健的控制干预政策，这些政策与传统方法相比，表现出更好的性能和对可能的预算限制的抵御能力作案方式。