Related papers: The context-specificity of virulence evolution rev…
It is well recognised that animal and plant pathogens form complex ecological communities of interacting organisms within their hosts. Although community ecology approaches have been applied to determine pathogen interactions at the…
Predicting the outcomes of species invasions is a central goal of ecology, a task made especially challenging due to ecological feedbacks. To address this, we develop a general theory of ecological invasions applicable to a wide variety of…
Yet often neglected, dynamical interdependencies between concomitant contagion processes can alter their intrinsic equilibria and bifurcations. A particular case of interest for disease control is the emergence of explosive transitions in…
A model describing the dynamics related to the spreading of non-lethal infectious diseases in a fixed-size population is proposed. The model consists of a non-linear delay-differential equation describing the time evolution of the increment…
We introduce a new methodology to analyze the evolution of epidemic time series, which is based on the construction of epidemic networks. First, we translate the time series into ordinal patterns containing information about local…
Recent work has attempted to use whole-genome sequence data from pathogens to reconstruct the transmission trees linking infectors and infectees in outbreaks. However, transmission trees from one outbreak do not generalize to future…
Vector-borne diseases often infect multiple host species, increasing the likelihood of disease persistence due to the presence of multiple reservoirs. Vector biting patterns and feeding preferences can shift in response to selective…
We present a thorough inspection of the dynamical behavior of epidemic phenomena in populations with complex and heterogeneous connectivity patterns. We show that the growth of the epidemic prevalence is virtually instantaneous in all…
We develop a mathematical framework to study the economic impact of infectious diseases by integrating epidemiological dynamics with a kinetic model of wealth exchange. The multi-agent description leads to study the evolution over time of a…
In this paper we study intra-host viral adaptation by antigenic cooperation - a mechanism of immune escape that serves as an alternative to the standard mechanism of escape by continuous genomic diversification and allows to explain a…
Because of its relevance to everyday life, the spreading of viral infections has been of central interest in a variety of scientific communities involved in fighting, preventing and theoretically interpreting epidemic processes. Recent…
We address the problem of diversification in religions by studying selection on cultural memes that colonize humans hosts. In analogy to studying the evolution of pathogens or symbionts colonizing animal hosts, we use models for…
Spatial extent is a complicating factor in mathematical biology. The possibility that an action at point A cannot immediately affect what happens at point B creates the opportunity for spatial nonuniformity. This nonuniformity must change…
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…
In some systems, the behavior of the constituent units can create a `context' that modifies the direct interactions among them. This mechanism of indirect modification inspired us to develop a minimal model of context-dependent spreading.…
Predictability of undesired events is a question of great interest in many scientific disciplines including seismology, economy, and epidemiology. Here, we focus on the predictability of invasion of a broad class of epidemics caused by…
During an infectious disease outbreak, providing accurate answers to policy questions about transmission requires a detailed model of the natural history of infectiousness. Unfortunately, direct measures of infectiousness are generally…
Infectious disease spread is a multi-scale process composed of within-host (biological) and between-host (social) drivers and disentangling them from each other is a central challenge in epidemiology. Here, we introduce VIBES, a multi-scale…
Forecasting transmission of infectious diseases, especially for vector-borne diseases, poses unique challenges for researchers. Behaviors of and interactions between viruses, vectors, hosts, and the environment each play a part in…
We study how the interplay between the memory immune response and pathogen mutation affects epidemic dynamics in two related models. The first explicitly models pathogen mutation and individual memory immune responses, with contacted…