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）：拟议的工作将为“疾病社区”的生态和进化动态开发一个一般框架。尽管流行病学领域具有杰出的历史，并取得了显着的成功，但无关感染之间相互作用的潜力并没有得到太多关注。提出了一种抗原不同感染之间相互作用的机制：急性感染后，个体在收缩其他疾病（主要是因为在康复期间进行隔离）暂时不可用。因此，每种病原体可用的潜在“宿主”数量受其他感染的暴发动态影响。如果感染与实质性死亡率有关，则潜在宿主将永久删除，并且相互作用采取疾病之间的竞争形式。这种机制导致所谓的“疾病干扰”。该建议旨在开发这个概念框架，回答许多基本的生态和进化问题。所有感染是否与所有其他感染相互作用？答案显然是否定的。直观地，预计感染之间这种负相互作用的强度将取决于感染宿主的程度相似性。对于人类感染，这将取决于感染时宿主年龄分布之间的重叠量。疾病干扰会影响进化动态吗？这项工作的一个核心假设是，干扰可能会选择增加疾病毒力。我们可以在建立抗原性多态性（例如登革热）的系统中使用干扰效应吗？干扰机理为研究多种菌株的感染提供了无效的模型。这项工作是否可能具有重要的公共卫生影响？初步工作表明，与使用常规估计值相比，使用较少的疫苗单位可以有益地使用干扰效应来消除感染。该建议还旨在构建统计工具，从而可以从数据中确定地检测到干扰的签名。由于其出色的时空数据集，尽管提出的机制是相当普遍的，但这项工作的大部分将集中在儿童期感染（例如麻疹，百日咳，水痘和风疹）上。开发的分析工具将应用于众多长期疾病记录，以探索干扰现象的普遍性。