An empirical test of the role of small-scale transmission in large-scale disease dynamics
| Autor: | Chentong Li, Greg Dwyer, Joseph R. Mihaljevic, Vanja Dukic, Constance J. Mehmel, Carlos M. Polivka |
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| Rok vydání: | 2018 |
| Předmět: |
Scale (ratio)
Mathematical model Computer science Experimental data Disease Forests Models Theoretical Moths Biology Bayesian inference Empirical research Transmission (telecommunications) Orders of magnitude (time) Infectious disease (medical specialty) Larva Host-Pathogen Interactions Disease Transmission Infectious Spatial ecology Econometrics Animals Proxy (statistics) Baculoviridae Disease transmission Ecology Evolution Behavior and Systematics |
| Popis: | A key assumption of models of infectious disease is that population-scale spread is driven by transmission between host individuals at small scales. This assumption, however, is rarely tested, likely because observing disease transmission between host individuals is non-trivial in many infectious diseases. Quantifying the transmission of insect baculoviruses at a small scale is in contrast straightforward. We fit a disease model to data from baculovirus epizootics (= epidemics in animals) at the scale of whole forests, while using prior parameter distributions constructed from branch-scale experiments. Our experimentally-constrained model fits the large-scale data very well, supporting the role of small-scale transmission mechanisms in baculovirus epizootics. We further compared our experimentally-based model to an unconstrained model that ignores our experimental data, serving as a proxy for models that include large-scale mechanisms. This analysis supports our hypothesis that small-scale mechanisms are important, especially individual variability in host susceptibility to the virus. Comparison of transmission rates in the two models, however, suggests that large-scale mechanisms increase transmission compared to our experimental estimates. Our study shows that small-scale and large-scale mechanisms drive forest-wide epizootics of baculoviruses, and that synthesizing mathematical models with data collected across scales is key to understanding the spread of infectious disease. |
| Databáze: | OpenAIRE |
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