How should pathogen transmission be modelled?

By Hamish McCallum, N. Barlow, J. Hone. Trends in Ecology & Evolution, 2001

1,138 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Host-pathogen models are essential for designing strategies for managing disease threats to humans, wild animals and domestic animals. The behaviour of these models is greatly affected by the way in which transmission between infected and susceptible hosts is modelled. Since host-pathogen models were first developed at the beginning of the 20th century, the 'mass action' assumption has almost always been used for transmission. Recently, however, it has been suggested that mass action has often been modelled wrongly. Alternative models of transmission are beginning to appear, as are empirical tests of transmission dynamics.

Subfields: Genetics, Infectious Diseases, Public Health, Environmental and Occupational Health

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/b02a5e55784fc226c4e4c51bcacc5652f99f2908

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Genetics

In Infectious Diseases

In Public Health, Environmental and Occupational Health

Citations in the corpus

Host-parasite population dynamics under combined frequency-and density-dependent transmission (2007, background): “This assumption can lead to transmission approximating density-dependence at low densities and frequency-dependence as densities increase (see also Thrall et al. 1995, Lockhart et al. 1996, Thrall and Antonovics 1997, Thrall et al. 1998, McCallum et al. 2001).”
Optimal Targeted Lockdowns in a Multi-Group SIR Model (2020, neutral): “See, for example, McCallum et al. (2001). 7In addition, Eichenbaum, Rebelo and Trabandt (2020a), Jones, Philippon and Venkateswaran (2020), Farboodi, Jarosch and Shimer (2020), Kudlyak, Smith and Wilson (2020) and Garibaldi, Moen and Pissarides (2020) are recent papers endogenizing economic behavior”
Pathogens can Slow Down or Reverse Invasion Fronts of their Hosts (2005, neutral): “Transmission between susceptibles and infected is via the standard incidence, also called proportionate mixing or frequency-dependent transmission, cf. Nold (1980), Hethcote (2000) and McCallum et al. (2001) .”
Mathematical models of infectious disease transmission (2008, background): “Two of the most common approaches are to assume density dependence, in which the number of contacts that are made by an individual increases with population numbers, such that incidence depends on the number of infected individuals (incidence = βxy, in which β is infectiousness, x is the number of s”
Global hotspots and correlates of emerging zoonotic diseases (2017, background): “Second, population density may affect transmission dynamics such that EID events in areas of denser population may be more likely to produce outbreaks large enough to be detected 37 .”
White-nose syndrome is likely to extirpate the endangered Indiana bat over large parts of its range (2013, background): “Disease transmission, a key process in host-pathogen interactions (McCallum et al., 2001), is however only slowly being elucidated (Wilder et al., 2011; Langwig et al., 2012; Maher et al., 2012).”
Influence of genetic relatedness and spatial proximity on chronic wasting disease infection among female white-tailed deer (2010, background): “Transmission is the most challenging epidemiological parameter to estimate for any host-pathogen system (McCal- lum et al. 2001).”