| dc.description.abstract | Herbal medicines have been an important part of health and wellness for hundreds of
years. Recently the World Health Organization estimated that 80% of people worldwide
rely on herbal medicines. Herbs contain many substances that are good for protecting the body and are therefore used in the treatment of various illnesses. Along with traditional medicines, herbs are often used in the treatment of chronic diseases such as rheumatism, migraine, chronic fatigue, asthma, eczema, and irritable bowel syndrome, among others. Herbal medicines are also applied in certain traditional communities as treatment against infectious diseases such as flu, malaria, measles, and even human immunodeficiency virus HIV-infection. Approximately 34 million people are currently infected with the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) and 2.5 million newly infected. Therefore, HIV has become one of the major public health problems worldwide. It is important to understand the impact of herbal medicines used on HIV/AIDS. Mathematical models enable us to make predictions about the qualitative behaviour of disease outbreaks and evaluation of the impact of prevention or intervention strategies. In this dissertation we explore mathematical models for studying the effect of usage of
herbal medicines on HIV. In particular we analyze a mathematical model for population
dynamics of HIV/AIDS. The latter will include the impact of herbal medicines and traditional healing methods. The HIV model exhibits two steady states; a trivial steady
state (HIV-infection free population) and a non-trivial steady state (persistence of HIV
infection). We investigate the local asymptotic stability of the deterministic epidemic
model and similar properties in terms of the basic reproduction number. Furthermore,
we investigate for optimal control strategies. We study a stochastic version of the deterministic model by introducing white noise and show that this model has a unique global positive solution. We also study computationally the stochastic stability of the white noise perturbation model. Finally, qualitative results are illustrated by means of numerical simulations. Some articles from the literature that feature prominently in this dissertation are [14] of Cai et al, [10] of Bhunu et al., [86] of Van den Driessche and Watmough, [64] of Naresh et al., Through the study in this dissertation, we have prepared a research paper [1], jointly with the supervisors to be submitted for publication in an accredited journal. The author of this dissertation also contributed to the research paper [2], which close to completion. 1. Abdulaziz Y.A. Mukhtar, Peter J. Witbooi and Gail D. Hughes. A mathematical model for population dynamics of HIV with ARV and herbal medicine. 2. P.J. Witbooi, T. Seatlhodi, A.Y.A. Mukhtar, E. Mwambene. Mathematical modeling of HIV/AIDS with recruitment of infecteds. | en_US |
