ArticlePhilosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences2017
Growth rate, transmission mode and virulence in human pathogens.
Article in Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences, 2017. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 36 papers.
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Who cites it
36 citing papers in PubMed, 62 citations in OpenAlex.
- Hyper-exponential growth in an epidemic model: some explicit solutions and their significance.Journal of mathematical biology · 2026Article
- Integrating the Microbiome Into Infection Ecology and Evolution in Wild Animals.Molecular ecology · 2026Review
- Surveillance on antimicrobial resistance: bacteriological monitoring and resistance profiles of isolates from surfaces and equipment at a Ghanaian tertiary healthcare facility.BMC infectious diseases · 2025Article
- Multi-response phylogenetic mixed models: concepts and application.Biological reviews of the Cambridge Philosophical Society · 2025Review
- Mutation- and Transcription-Driven Omic Burden of Daptomycin/Dalbavancin-R and Glycopeptide-RS Fitness Costs in High-Risk MRSA: A Nexus in Antimicrobial Resistance Mechanisms-Genome Proneness-Compensatory Adaptations.Antibiotics (Basel, Switzerland) · 2025Article
- Host Disease Tolerance Predicts Transmission Probability for a Songbird Pathogen.Ecology and evolution · 2025Article
- Dissecting transmission to understand parasite evolution.PLoS pathogens · 2025Review
- AVirulence · 2023Article
- Article
- Metabolic efficiency reshapes the seminal relationship between pathogen growth rate and virulence.Ecology letters · 2023Article
- Assessing the risk of West Nile Virus seasonal outbreaks and its vector control in an urbanizing bird community: An integrative R0-modelling study in the city of Merida, Mexico.PLoS neglected tropical diseases · 2023Article
- Specific resistance prevents the evolution of general resistance and facilitates disease emergence.Journal of evolutionary biology · 2023Article
- Death is overrated: the potential role of detection in driving virulence evolution.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2023Article
- High virulence is associated with pathogen spreadability in a songbird-bacterial system.Royal Society open science · 2023Article
- Phenotypic and Genotypic Virulence Characterisation ofInternational journal of molecular sciences · 2022Article
- Age-dependent virulence of human pathogens.PLoS pathogens · 2022Article
- Article
- An Unusual U2AF2 Inhibits Splicing and Attenuates the Virulence of the Human Protozoan ParasiteFrontiers in cellular and infection microbiology · 2022Article
- Investigating Pathogenicity and Virulence ofInternational journal of molecular sciences · 2021Article
- Evolution of human respiratory virus epidemics.F1000Research · 2021Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
4 authors at 3 institutions in 2 countries.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
The harm that pathogens cause to hosts during infection, termed virulence, varies across species from negligible to a high likelihood of rapid death. Classic theory for the evolution of virulence is based on a trade-off between pathogen growth, transmission and host survival, which predicts that higher within-host growth causes increased transmission and higher virulence. However, using data from 61 human pathogens, we found the opposite correlation to the expected positive correlation between pathogen growth rate and virulence. We found that (i) slower growing pathogens are significantly more virulent than faster growing pathogens, (ii) inhaled pathogens and pathogens that infect via skin wounds are significantly more virulent than pathogens that are ingested, but (iii) there is no correlation between symptoms of infection that aid transmission (such as diarrhoea and coughing) and virulence. Overall, our results emphasize how virulence can be influenced by mechanistic life-history details, especially transmission mode, that determine how parasites infect and exploit their hosts.This article is part of the themed issue 'Opening the black box: re-examining the ecology and evolution of parasite transmission'.
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