Mathematical Modeling of Hand-Foot-Mouth Disease: Quarantine as a Control Measure

Children are mostly infected by hand, foot and mouth disease (HFMD) in their early age. HFMD is considered as a mild to moderate contagious disease, but recent outbreaks are threatening to child health and also caused social and economic disturbance along with causalities in many countries. In this study we build a mathematical model of HFMD to understand the dynamics and analytically evaluate the effectiveness of quarantine as a control strategy. Our analyses show that disease could be controlled by quarantine of more actively infected individuals. We also qualitatively showed that disease transmission depends more on the number of actively infected individuals in the population at the initial time and also on the disease transmission coefficient at a given time.