A deterministic model is developed for the spatial spread of an epidemic disease in a geographical setting. The disease is borne by vectors to susceptible hosts through criss-cross dynamics. The model is focused on an outbreak that arises from a small number of infected hosts imported into a subregion of the geographical setting. The goal is to understand how spatial heterogeneity of the vector and host populations influences the dynamics of the outbreak, in both the geographical spread and the final size of the epidemic. Partial differential equations are formulated to describe the spatial interaction of the hosts and vectors. The partial differential equations have reaction-diffusion terms to describe the criss-cross interactions of hosts and vectors. The partial differential equations of the model are analyzed and proven to be well-posed. A local basic reproduction number for the epidemic is analyzed. The epidemic outcomes of the model are correlated to the spatially dependent parameters and initial conditions of the model. The partial differential equations of the model are adapted to seasonality of the vector population, and applied to the 2015–2016 Zika seasonal outbreak in Rio de Janeiro Municipality in Brazil. The results for the model simulations of the 2015–2016 Zika seasonal outbreak in Rio de Janeiro Municipality indicate that the spatial distribution and final size of the epidemic at the end of the season are strongly dependent on the location and magnitude of local outbreaks at the beginning of the season. The application of the model to the Rio de Janeiro Municipality Zika 2015–2016 outbreak is limited by incompleteness of the epidemic data and by uncertainties in the parametric assumptions of the model.

We study the global existence and approximation of the solutions to a reaction diffusion system coupled with an ordinary differential equation modeling direct transmission between individuals and indirect transmission via a contaminated environment of an epidemic disease.

Uniform-in-time bounds of nonnegative classical solutions to reaction-diffusion systems in all space dimension are proved. The systems are assumed to dissipate the total mass and to have locally Lipschitz nonlinearities of at most (slightly super-) quadratic growth. This pushes forward the recent advances concerning global existence of reaction-diffusion systems dissipating mass in which a uniform-in-time bound has been known only in space dimension one or two. As an application, skew-symmetric Lotka-Volterra systems are shown to have unique classical solutions which are uniformly bounded in time in all dimensions with relatively compact trajectories in $ C(\overline{\Omega})^m $.

We consider a system of reaction–diffusion equations including chemotaxis terms and coming out of the modelling of multiple sclerosis. The global existence of strong solutions to this system in any dimension is proved, and it is also shown that the solution is bounded uniformly in time. Finally, a nonlinear stability result is obtained when the chemotaxis term is not too big. We also perform numerical simulations to show the appearance of Turing patterns when the chemotaxis term is large.