Complexity and anisotropy in host morphology make populations less susceptible to epidemic outbreaks

One of the challenges in epidemiology is to account for the complex morphological structure of hosts such as plant roots, crop fields, farms, cells, animal habitats and social networks, when the transmission of infection occurs between contiguous hosts. Morphological complexity brings an inherent he...

Full description

Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Published in:Journal of the Royal Society interface 2010-07, Vol.7 (48), p.1083-1092
Main Authors: Pérez-Reche, Francisco J., Taraskin, Sergei N., Costa, Luciano da F., Neri, Franco M., Gilligan, Christopher A.
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Anisotropy
Caudata
Crops, Agricultural - genetics
Disease Outbreaks
Disease Susceptibility
Ecosystem
Epidemics
Heterogeneity
Percolation
Citations: Items that this one cites
Items that cite this one
Online Access:Get full text
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
Description
Summary:One of the challenges in epidemiology is to account for the complex morphological structure of hosts such as plant roots, crop fields, farms, cells, animal habitats and social networks, when the transmission of infection occurs between contiguous hosts. Morphological complexity brings an inherent heterogeneity in populations and affects the dynamics of pathogen spread in such systems. We have analysed the influence of realistically complex host morphology on the threshold for invasion and epidemic outbreak in an SIR (susceptible–infected–recovered) epidemiological model. We show that disorder expressed in the host morphology and anisotropy reduces the probability of epidemic outbreak and thus makes the system more resistant to epidemic outbreaks. We obtain general analytical estimates for minimally safe bounds for an invasion threshold and then illustrate their validity by considering an example of host data for branching hosts (salamander retinal ganglion cells). Several spatial arrangements of hosts with different degrees of heterogeneity have been considered in order to separately analyse the role of shape complexity and anisotropy in the host population. The estimates for invasion threshold are linked to morphological characteristics of the hosts that can be used for determining the threshold for invasion in practical applications.
ISSN:1742-5689
1742-5662
DOI:10.1098/rsif.2009.0475