Rates of spread of marine pathogens
By Hamish McCallum, Drew Harvell, Andrew P. Dobson. 2003
158 citations recorded by the source corpus.
Epidemics of marine pathogens can spread at extremely rapid rates. For example, herpes virus spread through pilchard populations in Australia at a rate in excess of 10 000 km year(-1), and morbillivirus infections in seals and dolphins have spread at more than 3000 km year(-1). In terrestrial environments, only the epidemics of myxomatosis and calicivirus in Australian rabbits and West Nile Virus in birds in North America have rates of spread in excess of 1000 km year(-1). The rapid rates of spread of these epidemics has been attributed to flying insect vectors, but flying vectors have not been proposed for any marine pathogen. The most likely explanation for the relatively rapid spread of marine pathogens is the lack of barriers to dispersal in some parts of the ocean, and the potential for long-term survival of pathogens outside the host. These findings caution that pathogens may pose a particularly severe problem in the ocean. There is a need to develop epidemic models capable of generating these high rates of spread and obtain more estimates of disease spread rate.
Subfields: Agronomy and Crop Science, Animal Science and Zoology, Epidemiology
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/899a276ab04f4f91c8076368915336e948d88aab
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In Animal Science and Zoology
In Epidemiology
Citations in the corpus
- Are infectious diseases really killing corals? Alternative interpretations of the experimental and ecological data (2007, background): “Compared to other marine epizootics with known pathogens this is a remarkably slow rate of transmission even for an open oceanic system of sessile hosts (McCallum et al., 2003).”
- Long-term patterns of an estuarine pathogen along a salinity gradient (2012, background): “These diseases can be described by the typical Susceptible-Infected-Recovered (SIR) model (McCallum et al., 2003; Ogut et al., 2005).”
- Host density thresholds and disease control for fisheries and aquaculture (2010, background): “In the oceans, host density is also increased by the aggregated nature of marine populations, which may increase disease outbreak and spread relative to terrestrial systems (McCallum et al. 2003, 2004).”
- The rising tide of ocean diseases: unsolved problems and research priorities (2004, background): “Data on pathogen spread in the ocean are limited, but the few cases in which information is available indicate that disease may spread at least as rapidly as any terrestrial epidemic (McCallum et al. 2003).”