Lethal exposure: An integrated approach to pathogen transmission via environmental reservoirs

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Abstract

To mitigate the effects of zoonotic diseases on human and animal populations, it is critical to understand what factors alter transmission dynamics. Here we assess the risk of exposure to lethal concentrations of the anthrax bacterium, Bacillus anthracis, for grazing animals in a natural system over time through different transmission mechanisms. We follow pathogen concentrations at anthrax carcass sites and waterholes for five years and estimate infection risk as a function of grass, soil or water intake, age of carcass sites, and the exposure required for a lethal infection. Grazing, not drinking, seems the dominant transmission route, and transmission is more probable from grazing at carcass sites 1–2 years of age. Unlike most studies of virulent pathogens that are conducted under controlled conditions for extrapolation to real situations, we evaluate exposure risk under field conditions to estimate the probability of a lethal dose, showing that not all reservoirs with detectable pathogens are significant transmission pathways.

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From superspreaders to disease hotspots: linking transmission across hosts and space

Sara Paull, Sejin Song, Katherine McClure … (2011)

Since the identification and imprisonment of “Typhoid Mary”, a woman who infected at least 47 people with typhoid in the early 1900s, epidemiologists have recognized that “superspreading” hosts play a key role in disease epidemics. Such variability in transmission also exists among species within a community and among habitat patches across a landscape, underscoring the need for an integrative framework for studying transmission heterogeneity, or the differences among hosts or locations in their contribution to pathogen spread. Here, we synthesize literature on human, plant, and animal diseases to evaluate the relative influence of host, pathogen, and environmental factors in producing highly infectious individuals, species, and landscapes. We show that host and spatial heterogeneity are closely linked and that quantitatively assessing the contribution of infectious individuals, species, or environmental patches to overall transmission can aid management strategies. We conclude by posing hypotheses regarding how pathogen natural history influences transmission variability and highlight emerging frontiers in this area of study.

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Multiple transmission pathways and disease dynamics in a waterborne pathogen model.

Amy Tien, David Earn (2010)

Multiple transmission pathways exist for many waterborne diseases, including cholera, Giardia, Cryptosporidium, and Campylobacter. Theoretical work exploring the effects of multiple transmission pathways on disease dynamics is incomplete. Here, we consider a simple ODE model that extends the classical SIR framework by adding a compartment (W) that tracks pathogen concentration in the water. Infected individuals shed pathogen into the water compartment, and new infections arise both through exposure to contaminated water, as well as by the classical SIR person-person transmission pathway. We compute the basic reproductive number ([Symbol: see text](0)), epidemic growth rate, and final outbreak size for the resulting "SIWR" model, and examine how these fundamental quantities depend upon the transmission parameters for the different pathways. We prove that the endemic disease equilibrium for the SIWR model is globally stable. We identify the pathogen decay rate in the water compartment as a key parameter determining when the distinction between the different transmission routes in the SIWR model is important. When the decay rate is slow, using an SIR model rather than the SIWR model can lead to under-estimates of the basic reproductive number and over-estimates of the infectious period.

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Home range plus: a space-time characterization of movement over real landscapes

Andrew Lyons, Wendy Turner, Wayne Getz (2013)

Background Advances in GPS technology have created both opportunities in ecology as well as a need for analytical tools that can deal with the growing volume of data and ancillary variables associated with each location. Results We present T-LoCoH, a home range construction algorithm that incorporates time into the construction and aggregation of local kernels. Time is integrated with Euclidean space using an adaptive scaling of the individual's characteristic velocity, enabling the construction of utilization distributions that capture temporal partitions of space as well as contours that differentiate internal space based on movement phase and time-use metrics. We test T-LoCoH against a simulated dataset and provide illustrative examples from a GPS dataset from springbok in Namibia. Conclusions The incorporation of time into home range construction expands the concept of utilization distributions beyond the traditional density gradient to spatial models of movement and time, opening the door to new applications in movement ecology. Electronic supplementary material The online version of this article (doi:10.1186/2051-3933-1-2) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.

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Journal

Journal ID (nlm-ta): Sci Rep

Journal ID (iso-abbrev): Sci Rep

Title: Scientific Reports

Publisher: Nature Publishing Group

ISSN (Electronic): 2045-2322

Publication date (Electronic): 06 June 2016

Publication date Collection: 2016

Volume: 6

Electronic Location Identifier: 27311

Affiliations

[1 ]Centre for Ecological and Evolutionary Synthesis (CEES), Department of Biosciences, University of Oslo , P.O. Box 1066 Blindern, 0361 Oslo, Norway

[2 ]Department of Biological Sciences, State University of New York , Albany, New York 12222, USA

[3 ]Department of Environmental Science, Policy and Management, University of California , Berkeley, 137 Mulford Hall, Berkeley, CA 94720-3112, USA

[4 ]Institute of Animal Sciences, Department of Environmental and Animal Hygiene, University of Hohenheim , Hohenheim, Germany

[5 ]Department of Biological Sciences, Faculty of Science, University of Namibia , Windhoek, Namibia

[6 ]Etosha Ecological Institute, Ministry of Environment and Tourism, Etosha National Park , PO Box 6, Okaukuejo, Namibia

[7 ]Institute of International Animal Health, Free University of Berlin , Königsweg 67, 14163 Berlin, Germany

[8 ]Emerging Pathogens Institute, University of Florida , Gainesville, FL, USA

[9 ]Genome Center and Department of Evolution and Ecology, University of California , Davis, CA, USA

[10 ]Retired, Salisbury, UK

[11 ]School of Mathematical Sciences, University of KwaZulu-Natal , Private Bag X54001, Durban 4000, South Africa

Author notes

[a ] wcturner@ 123456albany.edu

[*]

These authors contributed equally to this work.

Article

Publisher Item ID: srep27311

DOI: 10.1038/srep27311

PMC ID: 4893621

PubMed ID: 27265371

SO-VID: 0f4b2999-9708-4d67-b9f2-96e58fc312f2

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Lethal exposure: An integrated approach to pathogen transmission via environmental reservoirs

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Abstract

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Decoding Infection and Transmission

Most cited references 33

From superspreaders to disease hotspots: linking transmission across hosts and space

Multiple transmission pathways and disease dynamics in a waterborne pathogen model.

Home range plus: a space-time characterization of movement over real landscapes

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