Modeling Rift Valley fever in African buffalo: biological insights and
mathematical challenges

Rift Valley fever virus (RVF) is a mosquito-borne disease that cycles
between wildlife, livestock, and people in Africa, causing significant
loss.  Current literature has focused on correlating large epidemics of
RVF with weather events. However, little attention has been given to the
underlying mechanisms driving epidemics and persistence, such as
transmission from mosquitoes to wildlife. It is unclear how RVF virus
persists during the inter-epidemic periods, but there are two potential
nonexclusive explanations for RVF virus persistence:  1) RVF is maintained
in the mosquito population via vertical transmission, or 2) RVF circulates
in some wildlife reservoir population.

I will present a mathematical model for the dynamics of RVF to address the
role of free-living African buffalo in Kruger National Park in the
persistence of RVF.  Bovine tuberculosis (BTB) is an invasive bacterial
disease also recently infecting African buffalo. The model is extended to
examine immune-mediated interactions between chronic BTB and RVF outbreaks
on a population level.