Adaptive modeling of viral diseases in bats with a focus on rabies

Many emerging and reemerging viruses, such as rabies, SARS, Marburg, and Ebola have bat populations as disease reservoirs. Understanding the spillover from bats to humans and other animals, and the associated health risks requires an analysis of the disease dynamics in bat populations. Traditional c...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Journal of theoretical biology 2008-11, Vol.255 (1), p.69-80
Main Authors: Dimitrov, Dobromir T., Hallam, Thomas G., Rupprecht, Charles E., McCracken, Gary F.
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Animals
Bats
Chiroptera - immunology
Chiroptera - virology
Computer Simulation
Disease processes and demographics
Disease Reservoirs
Ebola virus
Humans
Immune system
Individual heterogeneity
Marburg virus
Models, Biological
Models, Immunological
Population Dynamics
Rabies
Rabies - transmission
Rabies virus
SARS coronavirus
Viral infection
Virus Diseases - immunology
Virus Diseases - transmission
Zoonoses - transmission
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Summary:Many emerging and reemerging viruses, such as rabies, SARS, Marburg, and Ebola have bat populations as disease reservoirs. Understanding the spillover from bats to humans and other animals, and the associated health risks requires an analysis of the disease dynamics in bat populations. Traditional compartmental epizootic models, which are relatively easy to implement and analyze, usually impose unrealistic aggregation assumptions about disease-related structure and depend on parameters that frequently are not measurable in field conditions. We propose a novel combination of computational and adaptive modeling approaches that address the maintenance of emerging diseases in bat colonies through individual (intra-host) models of the response of the host to a viral challenge. The dynamics of the individual models are used to define survival, susceptibility and transmission conditions relevant to epizootics as well as to develop and parametrize models of the disease evolution into uniform and diverse populations. Applications of the proposed approach to modeling the effects of immunological heterogeneity on the dynamics of bat rabies are presented.
ISSN:0022-5193
1095-8541
DOI:10.1016/j.jtbi.2008.08.007