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Coalescent models are used to study the transmission dynamics of rapidly evolving pathogens from molecular sequence data obtained from infected individuals. However coalescent parameters, such as effective population size, offer limited…
The movie Ben-Hur highlights the dynamics of contagion associated with leprosy, a pattern of forced aggregation driven by the emergence of symptoms and the fear of contagion. The 2014 Ebola outbreaks reaffirmed the dynamics of…
We numerically study disease dynamics that lead to the disease switching from one host species to another, resulting in diseases gaining the ability to infect, e.g., humans. Unlike previous studies that focused on branching processes…
As pathogens spread in a population of hosts, immunity is built up and the pool of susceptible individuals is depleted. This generates selective pressure, to which many human RNA viruses, such as influenza virus or SARS-CoV-2, respond with…
To describe the propagation of West Nile virus and/or Zika virus, in this paper, we propose and study a time-periodic reaction-diffusion model with general boundary conditions in heterogeneous environments and with four unknowns:…
The crisis caused by the COVID-19 outbreak around the globe raised an increasing concern about the ongoing emergence of variants of SARS-CoV-2 that may evade the immune response provided by vaccines. New variants appear due to mutation, and…
Towards the end of an infectious disease outbreak, when a period has elapsed without new case notifications, a key question for public health policy makers is whether the outbreak can be declared over. This requires the benefits of a…
Recently, the SARS-CoV-2 variants from the United Kingdom (UK), South Africa, and Brazil have received much attention for their increased infectivity, potentially high virulence, and possible threats to existing vaccines and antibody…
US public health authorities claim imposing quarantines on healthcare workers returning from West Africa is incorrect according to science. Their positions rely upon a set of studies and experience about outbreaks and transmission…
Compartmental models like the Susceptible-Infected-Recovered (SIR)\cite{Kermack1927} and its extensions such as the Susceptible-Exposed-Infected-Recovered (SEIRS)\cite{Ottar2020,Ignazio2021,Grimm2021,Paoluzzi2021} are commonly used to model…
Zoonotic diseases spread through pathogens-infected animal carriers. In the case of Ebola Virus Disease (EVD), evidence supports that the main carriers are fruit bats and non-human primates. Further, EVD spread is a multi-factorial problem…
In a letter published in Molecular Biology Evolution [10], Chen and Zhang argue that the variation of the mutation rate along the Escherichia coli genome that we recently reported [3] cannot be evolutionarily optimised. To support this…
We introduce and discuss a minimal individual-based model for influenza dynamics. The model takes into account the effects of specific immunization against viral strains, but also infectivity randomness and the presence of a short-lived…
When analysing new emerging infectious disease outbreaks one typically has observational data over a limited period of time and several parameters to estimate, such as growth rate, R0, serial or generation interval distribution, latent and…
Most antigenically novel and evolutionarily successful strains of seasonal influenza A (H3N2) originate in East, South, and Southeast Asia. To understand this pattern, we simulated the ecological and evolutionary dynamics of influenza in a…
Insect-borne diseases are diseases carried by insects affecting humans, animals or plants. They have the potential to generate massive outbreaks such as the Zika epidemic in 2015-2016 mostly distributed in the Americas, the Pacific and…
The semiregular variable Z UMa experienced a particularly deep minimum at the end of March 2014 followed by a three month rise to maximum. The rise and subsequent decline were followed with low resolution (R~1000) spectroscopy, possibly for…
The seasonal human influenza virus undergoes rapid evolution, leading to significant changes in circulating viral strains from year to year. These changes are typically driven by adaptive mutations, particularly in the antigenic epitopes,…
The size and shape of the region affected by an outbreak is relevant to understand the dynamics of a disease and help to organize future actions to mitigate similar events. A simple extension of the SIR model is considered, where agents…
A key scientific challenge during the outbreak of novel infectious diseases is to predict how the course of the epidemic changes under different countermeasures that limit interaction in the population. Most epidemiological models do not…