ArticlePLoS computational biology2013
Heterogeneity, mixing, and the spatial scales of mosquito-borne pathogen transmission.
Article in PLoS computational biology, 2013. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 91 papers.
What it found
Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.
The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.
Who cites it
91 citing papers in PubMed.
- The entomological impact of passive metofluthrin emanators against indoor Aedes aegypti: A randomized field trial.PLoS neglected tropical diseases · 2021Trial
- The Impact of Hotspot-Targeted Interventions on Malaria Transmission in Rachuonyo South District in the Western Kenyan Highlands: A Cluster-Randomized Controlled Trial.PLoS medicine · 2016Trial
- Landscape Heterogeneity Predicts Mosquito Vector Diversity in a Semi-arid Urbanization.EcoHealth · 2026Article
- Global epidemiology and evolutionary dynamics of arboviruses: A systematic review of surveillance, control strategies, and emerging threats.Dialogues in health · 2026Review
- Multi-model approach to understand and predict past and future dengue epidemic dynamics.Royal Society open science · 2025Article
- Predictability of infectious disease outbreak severity: Chikungunya as a case study.Science advances · 2025Article
- Multivariate resilience indicators to anticipate vector-borne disease outbreaks: A West Nile virus case-study.PLoS computational biology · 2025Article
- Heterogeneous malaria transmission patterns in southeastern Tanzania driven by socio-economic and environmental factors.Malaria journal · 2025Article
- Modeling Intraday Aedes-human exposure dynamics enhances dengue risk prediction.Scientific reports · 2025Article
- The effects of variable spatial aggregation on lymphatic filariasis transmission.Parasites & vectors · 2025Article
- Spatial scales of COVID-19 transmission in Mexico.PNAS nexus · 2024Article
- Managing spatio-temporal heterogeneity of susceptibles by embedding it into an homogeneous model: A mechanistic and deep learning study.PLoS computational biology · 2024Article
- Review
- Direct mosquito feedings on dengue-2 virus-infected people reveal dynamics of human infectiousness.PLoS neglected tropical diseases · 2023Article
- Spatial dynamics of malaria transmission.PLoS computational biology · 2023Article
- Article
- Close-kin mark-recapture methods to estimate demographic parameters of mosquitoes.PLoS computational biology · 2022Article
- How do i bite thee? let me count the ways: Exploring the implications of individual biting habits of Aedes aegypti for dengue transmission.PLoS neglected tropical diseases · 2022Article
- Real-time, spatial decision support to optimize malaria vector control: The case of indoor residual spraying on Bioko Island, Equatorial Guinea.PLOS digital health · 2022Article
- Rabies shows how scale of transmission can enable acute infections to persist at low prevalence.Science (New York, N.Y.) · 2022Article
31 more citing papers are in PubMed but not listed here.
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
4 authors.
Funding
Abstract
The Ross-Macdonald model has dominated theory for mosquito-borne pathogen transmission dynamics and control for over a century. The model, like many other basic population models, makes the mathematically convenient assumption that populations are well mixed; i.e., that each mosquito is equally likely to bite any vertebrate host. This assumption raises questions about the validity and utility of current theory because it is in conflict with preponderant empirical evidence that transmission is heterogeneous. Here, we propose a new dynamic framework that is realistic enough to describe biological causes of heterogeneous transmission of mosquito-borne pathogens of humans, yet tractable enough to provide a basis for developing and improving general theory. The framework is based on the ecological context of mosquito blood meals and the fine-scale movements of individual mosquitoes and human hosts that give rise to heterogeneous transmission. Using this framework, we describe pathogen dispersion in terms of individual-level analogues of two classical quantities: vectorial capacity and the basic reproductive number, R0. Importantly, this framework explicitly accounts for three key components of overall heterogeneity in transmission: heterogeneous exposure, poor mixing, and finite host numbers. Using these tools, we propose two ways of characterizing the spatial scales of transmission--pathogen dispersion kernels and the evenness of mixing across scales of aggregation--and demonstrate the consequences of a model's choice of spatial scale for epidemic dynamics and for estimation of R0, both by a priori model formulas and by inference of the force of infection from time-series data.
Indexed as
Identifiers
What OpenQuestion holds
Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.