Cigarette smoking on college campuses: an epidemical modelling approach

Cigarette smoking on college campuses has become a significant public health issue, which in turn led to an increasing focus on establishing programs to reduce its prevalence. In this paper, a compartmental model depicting the spread and cessation of the smoking habit on college campuses, obtained using theoretical principles often employed in mathematical epidemiology, is proposed and analysed. The existence and stability of the habitual smoking-free and habitual smoking-persistent equilibria, respectively, are explored in terms of a threshold parameter, hereby called the smokers generation number and denoted by \(R_c\). A sensitivity analysis indicates that \(R_c\) is the most sensitive to the contact rate between habitual-smokers and occasional-smokers and to the rate of successfully quitting smoking. Numerical simulations of the proposed optimal control strategies reveal that the most effective approach to reduce the prevalence of cigarette smoking and possibly achieve a smoking-free campus should combine both control measures, namely allocating mandatory smoking rooms together with educating the public on the harmful effects of smoking and providing large scale guidance, counselling and support therapy to help students quit smoking.