SCIENCE@home

The shapes of virulence to come

Aakash Pandey,Daniel E. Dawson

Published 2019 in Evolution, Medicine and Public Health

ABSTRACT

A pathogen’s virulence is the negative impact it has on a host. As a trait, virulence correlates with pathogen fitness, and hence can undergo selection. In directly transmitted pathogens, higher within-host growth rates are associated with higher transmission rates and greater fitness of the pathogen. Higher growth rates often result in higher virulence, resulting in the co-selection of virulence along with fitness. When expressed as mortality, increased virulence limits the amount of time an infected individual can transmit pathogens. This sets up a trade-off between infection duration and transmission probability, theoretically resulting in an optimal level of intermediate virulence [1] (Fig. 1). However, the nature of such trade-offs depends upon the life history strategies of both the pathogen and the host. Therefore, understanding virulence evolution pressures in different disease systems (e.g. vector-borne, environmentally transmitted and opportunistic) is critical to forecasting disease dynamics under changing conditions. EXAMPLE IN HUMAN BIOLOGY AND PUBLIC HEALTH

PUBLICATION RECORD

CITATION MAP

EXTRACTION MAP

CLAIMS

  • No claims are published for this paper.

CONCEPTS

  • No concepts are published for this paper.

REFERENCES

Showing 1-5 of 5 references · Page 1 of 1

CITED BY