Robert Alexander Cheke

University of Greenwich · Natural Resources Institute

Female Simulium damnosum s.l. were caught at a site in a savannah zone beside the Mono River in Togo and at varying distances westwards perpendicular to it in an experiment to investigate short-range dispersal by the flies. The numbers of flies caught and the percentages that were parous decreased with increasing distance from the river, the latter...

Past seasonal influenza epidemics and vaccination experience may affect individuals' decisions on whether to be vaccinated or not, decisions that may be constantly reassessed in relation to recent influenza related experience. To understand the potentially complex interaction between experience and decisions and whether the vaccination rate is like...

Intermittent androgen deprivation therapy is one of the most commonly used therapeutic regimens for treating prostate cancer. Immunotherapy with dendritic cells, which act as the most robust antigen-presenting cells, are regarded as an effective method for the treatment of advanced prostate cancer. This paper utilizes impulsive differential equatio...

Impulsive control strategies have been widely used in cancer treatment and linear impulsive control has always been considered in previous studies. We propose a novel tumour-immune model with nonlinear killing rate as state-dependent feedback control, which can better reflect the saturation effects of the tumour and immune cell mortalities due to c...

Simple Summary: Bean leaf beetles (Ootheca spp.) (Coleoptera: Chrysomelidae) are a major pest of the common bean (Phaseolus vulgaris L.) in Africa, attacking the roots, leaves, floral parts, and young pods, and reducing grain yields significantly. However, there is no comprehensive program for managing bean leaf beetles. In Uganda, farmers typicall...

Several outbreaks of COVID-19 caused by imported cases have occurred in China following the successful control of the outbreak in early 2020. In order to avoid recurrences of such local outbreaks, it is important to devise an efficient control and prevention strategy. In this paper, we developed a stochastic discrete model of the COVID-19 epidemic...

Smoking is a serious global public health problem. The ability to quit smoking is closely related to age; in addition, personal determination and education usually play an important role in quitting smoking. In order to capture such characteristics, we developed a novel age-structured smoking dynamical model. By defining the smoking generation numb...

This datasheet on Quelea quelea covers Identity, Overview, Distribution, Dispersal, Hosts/Species Affected, Diagnosis, Biology & Ecology, Environmental Requirements, Natural Enemies, Impacts, Uses, Prevention/Control, Further Information.

Bean leaf beetles (Ootheca spp.) (Insecta: Coleoptera: Chrysomelidae) are one of Africa's most destructive pests of common bean and other leguminous crops. The beetles are widely distributed in Africa where they are estimated to cause annual crop yield losses of 116,400 tons of crop yields in sub-Saharan Africa. Despite their importance, little is...

Purpose Dose-response curves, which fit a multitude of experimental data derived from toxicology, are widely used in physics, chemistry, biology, and other fields. Although there are many dose-response models for fitting dose-response curves, the application of these models is limited by many restrictions and lacks universality, so there is a need...

Data on pre-imaginal stages of blackflies obtained in southern England during the summer and early autumn of 2020 were supplemented by additional surveys and analysed in relation to environmental factors. Fourteen taxa from 29 locations were recorded. Of these, seven are of medical and/or veterinary importance: Simulium (Wilhelmia) equinum (Linnaeu...

Leishmaniasis is a debilitating disease of the tropics, subtropics and southern Europe caused by Leishmania parasites that are transmitted during blood feeding by phlebotomine sand flies (Diptera: Psychodidae). Using non-invasive micro-computed tomography, we were able to visualize the impact of the laboratory model infection of Lutzomyia longipalp...

The SARS-CoV-2 Delta variant, known as B.1.617.2 and first identified in India, is becoming a dominant strain in many countries due to its extreme infectiousness. Assessing and quantifying the transmissibility and competitive advantage of the Delta variant is of major significance for countries around the world so that appropriate measures to mitig...

Onchocerciasis elimination is within reach in many countries but requires enhanced surveillance of the Simulium vectors of Onchocerca volvulus. Collection of sufficient numbers of adult Simulium to detect infective O. volvulus larvae is hindered by limited sampling tools for these flies. Here, we tested for the first time the Host Decoy Trap (HDT),...

Mosquito Magnet® traps, deployed in widespread parts of England as part of nationwide mosquito surveillance projects, also caught blackflies. As many as 1242 blackflies were caught in a trapping session lasting 4 days. Principal among the species caught were Simulium equinum, Simulium lineatum and Simulium ornatum s.l. As S. ornatum s.l. is a vecto...

Intermittent androgen deprivation therapy is often used to treat prostate cancer, but there are few mathematical modelling studies of it. To explore the mechanisms of such therapy, we describe intermittent therapy with impulsive differential equations, then we propose a novel mathematical model of intermittent androgen deprivation therapy with whit...

Background The COVID-19 pandemic is complex and is developing in different ways according to the country involved. Methods To identify the key parameters or processes that have the greatest effects on the pandemic and reveal the different progressions of epidemics in different countries, we quantified enhanced control measures and the dynamics of...

Onchocerciasis (also known as ‘river blindness’), is a neglected tropical disease (NTD) caused by the (Simulium-transmitted) filarial nematode Onchocerca volvulus. The occurrence of ‘blinding’ (savannah) and non-blinding (forest) parasite strains and the existence of corresponding, locally adapted Onchocerca–Simulium complexes were postulated to ex...

By March 2020, China and Singapore had achieved remarkable results in the prevention and control of COVID-19, but in April Singapore’s outbreak began to deteriorate, while China’s remained controlled. Using detailed data from Tianjin, China, and Singapore, a stochastic discrete COVID-19 epidemic model was constructed to depict the impact of the epi...

Onchocerciasis is a neglected tropical disease (NTD) caused by Onchocerca Diesing 1841 (Spirurida: Onchocercidae) nematodes transmitted by blackflies. It is associated with poverty and imposes a significant health, welfare and economic burden on many tropical countries. Current methods to visualize infections within the vectors rely on invasive met...

Data as Supplementary Material 2 for Mullie et al 2021, PloS One

The entomopathogenic fungus Metarhizium acridum in oil-based formulations (Green Muscle® (GM)) is a biopesticide for locust control lacking side-effects on biodiversity, unlike chemical insecticides. Under controlled conditions, GM-treated locusts and grasshoppers attract predators, a complementary advantage in locust control. We assessed avian pre...

Citation: Cheke, R.A.; Young, S.; Wang, X.; Tratalos, J.A.; Tang, S.; Cressman, K. Evidence for a Causal Relationship between the Solar Cycle and Locust Abundance. Agronomy 2021, 11, 69. https://doi.org/10.3390/agronomy11010069.

The global outbreak of COVID-19 has caused worrying concern amongst the public and health authorities. The first and foremost problem that many countries face during the outbreak is a shortage of medical resources. In order to investigate the impact of a shortage of hospital beds on the COVID-19 outbreak, we formulated a piecewise smooth model for...

An expectation for optimal integrated pest management is that the instantaneous numbers of natural enemies released should depend on the densities of both pest and natural enemy in the field. For this, a generalised predator–prey model with nonlinear impulsive control tactics is proposed and its dynamics is investigated. The threshold conditions fo...

The book provides an overview of the biology, ecology and behaviour of British mosquitoes in wetlands, provides details of strategies for surveying mosquitoes, as well as species-specific details on the kinds of aquatic habitats that support British mosquitoes. It also includes details of the legal frameworks surrounding pest management as relates...

This review summarises more than a century of research on onchocerciasis, also known as river blindness, and its control. River blindness is an infection caused by the tissue filaria Onchocerca volvulus affecting the skin, subcutaneous tissue and eyes and leading to blindness in a minority of infected persons. The parasite is transmitted by its int...

The COVID-19 outbreak, designated a "pandemic" by the World Health Organization (WHO) on 11 March 2020, has spread worldwide rapidly. Each country implemented prevention and control strategies, mainly classified as SARS LCS (SARS-like containment strategy) or PAIN LMS (pandemic influenza-like mitigation strategy). The reasons for variation in each...

Responses to drugs play key roles in exploring how drug toxicity affects the evolution of tumour cells. We model pulsed comprehensive therapies using an impulsive tumour-immune model, in which the application of comprehensive therapies is dependent on a threshold tumour size. By employing the definitions and properties of the Poincaré map, we show...

A nonlinear discrete switching host-parasitoid model with Holling type II functional response function, in which the switch is guided by an economic threshold (ET), is proposed. Thus, if the weighted density of two generations of the host population increases and exceeds the ET, then integrated pest management (IPM) measures are enacted, i.e., biol...

Effective reproductive numbers (Rt) were calculated from data on the COVID-19 outbreak in China and linked to dates in 2020 when different interventions were enacted. From a maximum of 3.98 before the lockdown of Wuhan City, the values of Rt declined to below 1 by the second week of February, after construction of hospitals dedicated to COVID-19 pa...

There are many challenges to coupling the macroscale to the microscale in temporal or spatial contexts. In order to examine effects of an individual movement and spatial control measures on a disease outbreak, we developed a multiscale model and extended the semi-stochastic simulation method by linking individual movements to pathogen’s diffusion,...

Background: The global outbreak of COVID-19 has caused worrying concern amongst the public and health authorities. The first and foremost problem that many countries face is a shortage of medical resources. The experience of Wuhan, China, in fighting against COVID-19 provides a model for other countries to learn from. Methods: We formulated a piece...

The COVID-19 pandemic is complex and is developing in different ways according to the country involved. To identify the key parameters or processes that have the greatest effects on the pandemic and reveal the different progressions of epidemics in different countries, we quantified enhanced control measures and the dynamics of the production and p...