Hindawi Publishing Corporation Journal of Applied Mathematics Volume 2012, Article ID 854723, 20 pages doi:10.1155/2012/854723 Research Article Optimal Control of a Spatio-Temporal Model for Malaria: Synergy Treatment and Prevention Malicki Zorom, 1, 2 Pascal Zongo, 2, 3 Bruno Barbier, 1, 3 and Blaise Som ´ e 2 1 Laboratoire d’Hydrologie et Ressources en Eau, Institut International d’Ing´ enierie de l’Eau et de l’Environnement (2iE), 01 Rue de la Science, BP 594, Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso 2 Laboratoire CEREGMIA, Universit´ e des Antilles et de la Guyane, 2091 Route de Baduel, 97157 Pointe-` a-Pitre, France 3 CIRAD, UMR G-EAU, 34398 Montpellier, France Correspondence should be addressed to Bruno Barbier, bbarbier@cirad.fr Received 29 January 2012; Revised 10 May 2012; Accepted 10 May 2012 Academic Editor: Zhiwei Gao Copyright q 2012 Malicki Zorom et al. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. We propose a metapopulation model for malaria with two control variables, treatment and prevention, distributed between n different patches localities. Malaria spreads between these localities through human travel. We used the theory of optimal control and applied a mathematical model for three connected patches. From previous studies with the same data, two patches were identified as reservoirs of malaria infection, namely, the patches that sustain malaria epidemic in the other patches. We argue that to reduce the number of infections and semi-immunes i.e., asymptomatic carriers of parasites in overall population, two considerations are needed, a For the reservoir patches, we need to apply both treatment and prevention to reduce the number of infections and to reduce the number of semi-immunes; neither the treatment nor prevention were specified at the beginning of the control application, except prevention that seems to be effective at the end. b For unreservoir patches, we should apply the treatment to reduce the number of infections, and the same strategy should be applied to semi-immune as in a. 1. Introduction Malaria is a mosquito-borne infection caused by protozoa of the genus plasmodium. Parasites are transmitted indirectly from humans to humans by the bite of infected female mosquitoes of the genus Anopheles. Malaria is a public health problem for tropical countries, which has negative impacts on development. The fight against mosquitoes passes through the draining of marshes or conversion to running water and elimination of stagnant water