ORIGINAL RESEARCH article
Front. Agron.
Sec. Disease Management
Modeling Partial Cross-Protection for Managing Cassava Mosaic Disease: A Vector–Host Framework and Sensitivity Analysis
Provisionally accepted
Myunghyun Oh*
Mohit Garg- Accessible Teaching, Learning, and Assessment Systems, University of Kansas, Lawrence, United States
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Cross-protection, in which prior infection with a mild viral strain reduces susceptibility to a severe strain, offers a promising but underexplored strategy for managing persistent plant diseases. We developed a host–vector transmission model for cassava mosaic disease (CMD) that incorporates partial cross-protection, roguing, replanting, harvesting, and vector control. The model reveals that protection effectiveness strongly influences long-term outcomes: current field-level cross-protection (≈2-fold reduction in susceptibility) provides limited benefits, whereas optimized protection (≥20-fold) could enable near-elimination at moderate coverage. Analytical results demonstrate conditions for backward bifurcation, where disease elimination requires lowering transmission below stricter thresholds than those predicted by the basic reproduction number. Global sensitivity and uncertainty analyses identify cross-protection parameters and roguing as the most influential drivers of CMD prevalence. Although developed for cassava, the framework extends to other vector-borne crop diseases where protective interference occurs, providing quantitative guidance for designing ecologically robust management strategies.
Keywords: cross-protection, Cassava mosaic disease, Vector-borne viruses, Backward bifurcation, sensitivity analysis, Disease management strategies, mathematical modeling, Plant disease epidemiology
Received: 10 Sep 2025; Accepted: 20 Nov 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 Oh and Garg. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence: Myunghyun Oh, myoh@ku.edu
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