Videos

The interplay of infectivity that decreases with virulence and limited cross-immunity: (toy) models for respiratory disease evolution

Presenter
March 21, 2012
Abstract
Models for the evolution of virulence traditionally assume a trade-off between inverse disease-induced mortality rate and infectivity, resulting in intermediate virulence. The underlying intuition is that faster growing agent populations do both more damage and produce more infective particles. This intuition implicitly assumes a well-mixed host body. In reality both damage and infectivity depend mainly on the location in the body where the agents lodge. This is related i.a. to the surface proteins that allow agents to dock on and penetrate into different cell types. The typical example is respiratory diseases where more deeply seated ones are both less infective and more harmful. With the other standard assumption, full cross-immunity between disease strains, this would lead to evolution towards the tip of the nose. In reality cross-immunity depends on surface antigens and hence is at least in part connected to depth. In this talk I discuss a simple adaptive dynamics style model taking on board the aforementioned considerations. The inference is that disease diversity should decrease with depth. (The reported work was done in collaboration with Kevin Kleine and Juan E. Keymer Vergara of Delft University of Technology.)