We use a metapopulation model to explore the effects of spatial host heterogeneity, effectively dividing the human population into interconnected communities. As an example of the general case of spatially structured communities, we focus on a simple village -city model to approximate the spatial host heterogeneity in rural areas connected, by human mobility, to bigger cities. There are many different types of human mobility between communities such as villages and cities, including short-term commuting and long-term labour migration. Particularly in developing countries, however, information on dominant patterns is sparse. Nonetheless, anecdotal evidence from Vietnam [17] , for example, suggests that short term commuting plays an important role: here, a subset of the village residents collects agricultural produce for trading in local markets in the city, and travels to the city on a daily to weekly basis. Accordingly we present a model in which the residence time of villagers in the city is typically less than the infectious period. However, in the supplementary information we also present a model incorporating migration on longer timescales (see Text S1, A.2). These two different models illustrate that our results appear qualitatively robust to different types of human movement.