Ecology and Evolution of Disease Interference

疾病干扰的生态学和进化

• 批准号: 6872160
• 负责人: Pejman Rohani
• 金额: $ 14.72万
• 依托单位: UNIVERSITY OF GEORGIA
• 依托单位国家: 美国
• 财政年份: 2004
• 资助国家: 美国
• 起止时间: 2004-05-01 至 2008-04-30
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://reporter.nih.gov/project-details/6872160
• 关键词: age difference; bacteria infection mechanism; communicable disease control; computer simulation; disease outbreaks; disease reservoirs; ecology; evolution; host organism interaction; human data; infection; longitudinal human study; microorganism interaction; public health; secondary infection; statistics /biometry; virulence; virus infection mechanism; virus virus interaction

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): The proposed work will develop a general framework for the ecological and evolutionary dynamics of "disease communities". Although the field of epidemiology has a distinguished history with notable successes, the potential for interaction between unrelated infections has not received much attention. A mechanism for interaction between antigenically distinct infections is proposed: following an acute infection, individuals are temporarily unavailable to contract other diseases (primarily because quarantining during convalescence). Hence, the number of potential "hosts" available for each pathogen is affected by the outbreak dynamics of other infections. If an infection is associated with substantial mortality, then potential hosts become permanently removed and the interaction takes the form of competition between diseases. This mechanism leads to what is called "disease interference". This proposal aims to develop this conceptual framework, answering a number of fundamental ecological and evolutionary questions. Do all infections interact with all other infections? The answer to this is clearly no. Intuitively, it would be expected that the strength of this negative interaction between infections would depend on the degree similarity in hosts infected. For human infections, this would be determined by the amount of overlap between the distributions of the host age at infection. Does disease interference affect evolutionary dynamics? A central hypothesis of this work is that interference is likely to select for increased disease virulence. Can we use interference effects in systems where antigenic polymorphism is well established (e.g. Dengue)? The interference mechanism provides a null model for the study of infections with multiple strains. Is this work likely to have any important public health implications? Preliminary work suggests interference effects may be beneficially used to eradicate infections using fewer vaccine units than using conventional estimates. This proposal also aims to construct statistical tools whereby the signature of interference may be confidently detected from data. Due to their excellent spatio-temporal data sets, much of this work will focus on childhood infections (e.g. as measles, pertussis, chickenpox and rubella), though the proposed mechanism is quite general. The analytical tools developed will be applied to numerous long-term disease records to explore the ubiquity of the interference phenomenon.

描述（由申请人提供）：拟议的工作将开发一个“疾病社区”的生态和进化动力学的一般框架。虽然流行病学领域有着辉煌的历史，取得了显著的成功，但无关感染之间相互作用的可能性尚未受到太多关注。提出了抗原性不同感染之间相互作用的机制：急性感染后，个体暂时无法感染其他疾病（主要是因为恢复期的禁食）。因此，每种病原体可利用的潜在“宿主”的数量受到其他感染爆发动态的影响。如果感染与大量死亡有关，那么潜在的宿主就会被永久性地清除，相互作用的形式就是疾病之间的竞争。这种机制导致所谓的“疾病干扰”。该提案旨在发展这一概念框架，回答一些基本的生态和进化问题。所有的感染都与其他感染相互作用吗？答案显然是否定的。直觉上，可以预期感染之间这种负面相互作用的强度将取决于受感染宿主的相似程度。对于人类感染，这将由感染时宿主年龄分布之间的重叠量确定。疾病干扰影响进化动力学吗？这项工作的一个中心假设是，干扰可能会选择增加疾病的毒力。我们能否在抗原多态性已得到充分证实的系统中使用干扰效应（例如登革热）？干扰机制为研究多菌株感染提供了零模型。这项工作是否可能对公共卫生产生重要影响？初步工作表明，干扰效应可能有利于消除感染，使用更少的疫苗单位比使用传统的估计。该提案还旨在构建统计工具，从而可以从数据中可靠地检测干扰的特征。由于其出色的时空数据集，这项工作的大部分将集中在儿童感染（如麻疹，百日咳，水痘和风疹），虽然拟议的机制是相当普遍的。开发的分析工具将应用于许多长期疾病记录，以探索干扰现象的普遍性。