A cellular automaton model for the transmission of Chagas disease in heterogeneous landscape and host community

Chagas disease is a vector-borne disease and a major public health concern in Latin America. To understand the disease dynamics, we investigated the influence of landscape heterogeneity and host diversity on pathogen transmission. We developed an epidemiological model based on the cellular automata approach to simulate the spread of Chagas disease in homogeneous and heterogeneous environments with competent and noncompetent hosts species. We show at first that weak levels of dispersal are associated with a reduction in infection as vectors infected in habitats of high transmission tend to spread into habitats with fewer hosts. A second important conclusion is that larger levels of dispersal can have very contrasted effects depending on the composition of the host community in the area of lower intrinsic transmission.