Age-structured HPV dynamics under randomly switching epidemiological regimes

Human papillomavirus (HPV) is a common sexually transmitted infection whose transmission and disease progression depend strongly on age and are shaped by prevention strategies such as vaccination and screening. Temporal changes in transmission conditions, contact patterns, and healthcare conditions may induce epidemiological regimes that switch over time, making it difficult to characterize long-term transmission and invasion thresholds. We study an age-structured model for HPV transmission in a randomly fluctuating epidemiological environment, where temporal variability in epidemiological conditions is represented by a finite-state continuous-time Markov chain, while vaccination is assumed to remain fixed across regimes. Each regime is governed by a deterministic age-structured system. Using semigroup methods, we characterize the invasion threshold of the randomly switching system, relate it to the reproduction numbers of the regime-specific models, and derive fast- and slow-switching limits. We further establish exponential extinction of the infected population in mean and almost surely when the random reproduction number is below one, while above the threshold we obtain instability of the linearized first-moment dynamics. Our results provide a rigorous mathematical framework for understanding HPV dynamics under temporally varying epidemiological conditions.