PrEP Intervention in the Mitigation of HIV/AIDS Epidemics in China via a Data-Validated Age-Structured Model

Antiretroviral-based pre-exposure prophylaxis (PrEP) treatment offers a new opportunity for protecting humans against HIV and disrupting current HIV prevention systems. However, implementing this preventive measure has been difficult due to its high cost. In this paper, we propose an age-structured model that incorporates infection ages, HAART (highly active antiretroviral therapy), and PrEP intervention. We investigate the qualitative behavior of the model and find a threshold parameter (the basic reproduction number) that determines the asymptotic stability of equilibria. We validate the model and estimate the parameters by confronting the actual HIV/AIDS data from 2004 to 2018 in China using MCMC (Markov Chain Monte Carlo) method. Furthermore, we investigate the PrEP intervention strategy by using incremental cost-effectiveness and average cost-effectiveness. Our work suggests that PrEP intervention based on the infection characteristics of different age groups can be an effective strategy to eradicate HIV/AIDS epidemics in China.