Feb.
5, 2013 — How, when and where a pathogen is transmitted between two
individuals in a population is crucial in understanding and predicting how a
disease will spread. New research has laid the foundation for a new generation
of zoonotic disease spreading models, which could allow for more targeted
prevention strategies.
By
using novel complexity sciences tools the study, published in Physical Review
Letters, outlines a predictive model of a spatial epidemic spread in a
population of territorial animals.
By
quantifying the instances of transmission events, the research team, Dr Luca
Giuggioli, Senior Lecturer in Complexity Sciences in the Department of
Engineering Mathematics and the School of Biological Sciences at the University
of Bristol, and Dr David Sanders and Master's student, Sebastian Pérez-Becker,
from UNAM, Mexico, have determined the propagation speed of a pathogen based on
the knowledge of the demography of a species, the way animals wander and the
degree of contagiousness of the disease.
As a
large percentage of new and remerging human infectious diseases are of animal
origin, models that track how pathogens hop from one animal host to another
will help develop more effective control measures that are capable of
identifying specific individuals or class of individuals rather than
ineffective and costly widespread culling procedures of an entire population.
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