Related papers: Persistence-infectivity trade-offs in environmenta…
The study of infectious disease has been of interest to ecologists since long. The initiation of epidemic and the long term disease dynamics are largely influenced by the nature of the underlying consumer (host)-resource dynamics.…
The annual occurrence of many infectious diseases remains a constant burden to public health systems. The seasonal patterns in respiratory disease incidence observed in temperate regions have been attributed to the impact of environmental…
In ecological systems heterogeneous interactions between pathogens take place simultaneously. This occurs, for instance, when two pathogens cooperate, while at the same time multiple strains of these pathogens co-circulate and compete.…
Cooperation and competition between pathogens can alter the amount of individuals affected by a co-infection. Nonetheless, the evolution of the pathogens' behavior has been overlooked. Here, we consider a co-evolutionary model where the…
Rapidly mutating pathogens may be able to persist in the population and reach an endemic equilibrium by escaping hosts' acquired immunity. For such diseases, multiple biological, environmental and population-level mechanisms determine the…
The emergence or adaptation of pathogens may lead to epidemics, highlighting the need for a thorough understanding of pathogen evolution. The tradeoff hypothesis suggests that virulence evolves to reach an optimal transmission intensity…
Pathogen transmission and virulence are main evolutionary variables broadly assumed to be linked through trade-offs. In well-mixed populations, these trade-offs are often ascribed to physiological restrictions, while populations with…
The dynamics of epidemic spreading is often reduced to the single control parameter $R_0$, whose value, above or below unity, determines the state of the contagion. If, however, the pathogen evolves as it spreads, $R_0$ may change over…
Infectious pathogens often propagate by superspreading, which focusses onward transmission on disproportionately few infected individuals. At the same time, infector-infectee pairs tend to have more similar transmission potentials than…
Different pathogens spreading in the same host population often generate complex co-circulation dynamics because of the many possible interactions between the pathogens and the host immune system, the host life cycle, and the space…
Human mobility, contact patterns, and their interplay are key aspects of our social behavior that shape the spread of infectious diseases across different regions. In the light of new evidence and data sets about these two elements,…
The endogenous adaptation of agents, that may adjust their local contact network in response to the risk of being infected, can have the perverse effect of increasing the overall systemic infectiveness of a disease. We study a dynamical…
Mathematical models of infectious disease transmission typically neglect within-host dynamics. Yet within-host dynamics - including pathogen replication, host immune responses, and interactions with microbiota - are crucial not only for…
Antigenic escape constitutes the main mechanism allowing rapidly evolving viruses to achieve endemicity. Beyond granting immune escape, empirical evidence also suggests that mutations of viruses might increase their inter-host…
Interactions among multiple infectious agents are increasingly recognized as a fundamental issue in the understanding of key questions in public health, regarding pathogen emergence, maintenance, and evolution. The full description of…
In many epidemiological and ecological contexts, there is a trade-off between infections and interactions. This arises because the links between individuals capable of spreading infections are also often associated with beneficial…
Up to now, the effects of having heterogeneous networks of contacts have been studied mostly for diseases which are not persistent in time, i.e., for diseases where the infectious period can be considered very small compared to the lifetime…
Many pathogens spread primarily via direct contact between infected and susceptible hosts. Thus, the patterns of contacts or contact network of a population fundamentally shapes the course of epidemics. While there is a robust and growing…
Diseases spread through host populations over the networks of contacts between individuals, and a number of results about this process have been derived in recent years by exploiting connections between epidemic processes and bond…
The theory of life history evolution provides a powerful framework to understand the evolutionary dynamics of pathogens in both epidemic and endemic situations. This framework, however, relies on the assumption that pathogen populations are…