A non-standard finite difference method to solve a model of HIV–Malaria co-infection

In this paper, we design and analyse a non-standard finite difference numerical scheme for the numerical solution of the HIV–malaria co-infection model with a distributed delay representing the incubation period of malaria parasite in the mosquitoes vector. To come up with the efficient numerical method for the full co-infection model, we study a number of qualitative properties of sub-models and then use the information while designing the numerical methods for these sub-models. One of the salient features of these methods is that they preserve positivity of the solution which is very essential while studying epidemiological models. We also present numerical simulations to confirm the theoretical findings.