Related papers: Does host contact structure reduce pathogen divers…
The spread of infectious disease and the evolution of antigenically distinct strains are often modeled separately, despite strong feedbacks mediated by host immune memory and heterogeneous contacts. To tackle this challenging problem, we…
For many infectious diseases, a small-world network on an underlying regular lattice is a suitable simplified model for the contact structure of the host population. It is well known that the contact network, described in this setting by a…
Coinfection is the process by which a host that is infected with a pathogen becomes infected by a second pathogen at a later point in time. An immunosuppressant host response to a primary disease can facilitate spreading of a subsequent…
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…
The contact structure of a population plays an important role in transmission of infection. Many ``structured models'' capture aspects of the contact structure through an underlying network or a mixing matrix. An important observation in…
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…
Coinfection phenomena are common in nature, yet there is a lack of analytical approaches for coinfection systems with a high number of circulating and interacting strains. In this paper, we investigated a coinfection SIS framework applied…
In the first part of this paper, we review old and new results about the influence of host population heterogeneity on (various characteristics of) epidemic outbreaks. In the second part we highlight a modelling issue that so far has…
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…
During infectious disease epidemics, pathogen transmission occurs in host populations made up of interacting subpopulations. Using stochastic simulation and analytical approximations, we examine how outbreak sizes in networked populations…
We introduce and analyze a within-host dynamical model of the coevolution between rapidly mutating pathogens and the adaptive immune response. Pathogen mutation and a homeostatic constraint on lymphocytes both play a role in allowing the…
The increase in the connectivity between hosts in recent times has facilitated the emergence of more aggressive mutant viral strains, making their containment and eradication significantly more challenging compared to the original variants.…
Several pathogens use evolvability as a survival strategy against acquired immunity of the host. Despite their high variability in time, some of them exhibit quite low variability within the population at any given time, a somehow…
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.…
The spread of certain diseases can be promoted, in some cases substantially, by prior infection with another disease. One example is that of HIV, whose immunosuppressant effects significantly increase the chances of infection with other…
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…
When a fraction of a population becomes immune to an infectious disease, the population-wide infection risk decreases nonlinearly due to collective protection, known as herd immunity. Some studies based on mean-field models suggest that…
Herd immunity is shaped not only by the infection capacity of a spreading epidemic or the contact structure of the hosting population, but also by how and under what circumstances individuals acquire immunity. Immunization strategies may…
A model for the spread of an infection is analyzed for different population structures. The interactions within the population are described by small world networks, ranging from ordered lattices to random graphs. For the more ordered…
When an epidemic spreads in a population, individuals may adaptively change the structure of their social contact network to reduce risk of infection. Here we study the spread of an epidemic on an adaptive network with community structure.…