ArticlePLoS biology2015
The Need for Evolutionarily Rational Disease Interventions: Vaccination Can Select for Higher Virulence.
Article in PLoS biology, 2015. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 8 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.
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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
8 citing papers in PubMed, 24 citations in OpenAlex.
- Global vaccination coverage and disease incidence in cattle, pigs, and poultry.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2025Article
- Experimental evolution of a pathogen confronted with innate immune memory increases variation in virulence.PLoS pathogens · 2025Article
- Utility of compartmental models to test the competing hypotheses of pathogen evolution and human intervention.Frontiers in public health · 2025Article
- The evolution of post-infection mortality.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2024Article
- Markets as drivers of selection for highly virulent poultry pathogens.Nature communications · 2024Article
- Contrasting evolution of virulence and replication rate in an emerging bacterial pathogen.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2019Article
- Why the evolution of vaccine resistance is less of a concern than the evolution of drug resistance.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2018Article
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Authors and funding
1 author at 1 institution in 2 countries.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
There is little doubt evolution has played a major role in preventing the control of infectious disease through antibiotic and insecticide resistance, but recent theory suggests disease interventions such as vaccination may lead to evolution of more harmful parasites. A new study published in PLOS Biology by Andrew Read and colleagues shows empirically that vaccination against Marek's disease has favored higher virulence; without intervention, the birds die too quickly for any transmission to occur, but vaccinated hosts can both stay alive longer and shed the virus. This is an elegant empirical demonstration of how evolutionary theory can predict potentially dangerous responses of infectious disease to human interventions.
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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.