Related papers: A minimal stochastic model for influenza evolution
Between pandemics, the influenza virus exhibits periods of incremental evolution via a process known as antigenic drift. This process gives rise to a sequence of strains of the pathogen that are continuously replaced by newer strains,…
The evolutionary dynamics of human Influenza A virus presents a challenging theoretical problem. An extremely high mutation rate allows the virus to escape, at each epidemic season, the host immune protection elicited by previous…
Consider a birth and death chain to model the number of types of a given virus. Each type gives birth to a new type at rate $\lambda$ and dies at rate 1. Each type is also assigned a fitness. When a death occurs either the least fit type…
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…
Seasonal influenza presents an ongoing challenge to public health. The rapid evolution of the flu virus necessitates annual vaccination campaigns, but the decision to get vaccinated or not in a given year is largely voluntary, at least in…
Viruses evolve in the background of host immune systems that exert selective pressure and drive viral evolutionary trajectories. This interaction leads to different evolutionary patterns in antigenic space. Examples observed in nature…
In this article, we focus on the analysis of the potential factors driving the spread of influenza, and possible policies to mitigate the adverse effects of the disease. To be precise, we first invoke discrete Fourier transform (DFT) to…
Many infectious diseases are comprised of multiple strains with examples including Influenza, tuberculosis, and Dengue virus. The time evolution of such systems is linked to a complex landscape shaped by interactions between competing…
This study presents a family of stochastic models for the dynamics of influenza in a closed human population. We consider treatment for the disease in the form of vaccination, and incorporate the periods of effectiveness of the vaccine and…
Common respiratory viruses cause seasonal epidemics in sequential patterns. The underlying mechanisms for this pattern have been debated for some time. For influenza, contenders include temperature, humidity, and vitamin D levels. While…
We propose a model of the immunity to a cyclical epidemic disease taking account not only of seasonal boosts during the infectious season, but also of residual immunity remaining from one season to the next. The focus is on the exponential…
The dynamics of strongly immunizing childhood infections is still not well understood. Although reports of successful modeling of several incidence data records can be found in the literature, the key determinants of the observed temporal…
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,…
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…
Mechanisms of immunity, and of the host-pathogen interactions in general are among the most fundamental problems of medicine, ecology, and evolution studies. Here, we present a microscopic, protein-level, sequence-based model of immune…
We study an abstract model for the co-evolution between mutating viruses and the adaptive immune system. In sequence space, these two populations are localized around transiently dominant strains. Delocalization or error thresholds exhibit…
Among various possible causes of autoimmune disease, an important role is played by infections that can result in a breakdown of immune tolerance, primarily through the mechanism of "molecular mimicry". In this paper we propose and analyse…
Viruses like influenza have long coevolved with host immune systems, gradually shaping the evolutionary trajectory of these pathogens. Host immune systems develop immunity against circulating strains, which in turn avoid extinction by…
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…
Influenza viruses undergo continual antigenic evolution allowing mutant viruses to evade host immunity acquired to previous virus strains. Antigenic phenotype is often assessed through pairwise measurement of cross-reactivity between…