ArticlePLoS biology2019
Coinfections by noninteracting pathogens are not independent and require new tests of interaction.
Article in PLoS biology, 2019. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 19 papers, 1 of them a synthesis that pooled it.
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Who cites it
19 citing papers in PubMed, 1 synthesis or guideline pooled it.
- Viral Co-Infection in Bats: A Systematic Review.Viruses · 2023Pooled it
- Ecological Frameworks of Pathogen-Pathogen and Pathogen-Microbiome Interactions Within the Tick Holobiont.Pathogens (Basel, Switzerland) · 2026Review
- ChasingAnimals : an open access journal from MDPI · 2025Article
- Modelling behavioural changes and vaccination in the transmission of respiratory viruses with co-infection.Journal of mathematical biology · 2025Article
- Coinfection by multipleMicrobiology and molecular biology reviews : MMBR · 2025Review
- Seasonal variation and interspecies dynamics amongmedRxiv : the preprint server for health sciences · 2025Article
- Heterogeneous mosquito exposure increasesProceedings. Biological sciences · 2024Article
- Review
- Experimentally evolvedMicrobiology (Reading, England) · 2024Article
- Reconstructing multi-strain pathogen interactions from cross-sectional survey data via statistical network inference.Journal of the Royal Society, Interface · 2023Article
- The characterization of toll-like receptor repertoire inEcology and evolution · 2023Article
- Ecological interactions driving population dynamics of two tick-borne pathogens,Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2023Article
- Dengue Fever, Crimean-Congo Hemorrhagic Fever, and COVID-19 Triple Co-infection: Out of the Frying Pan Into the Fire.Cureus · 2022Article
- The pitfalls of inferring virus-virus interactions from co-detection prevalence data: application to influenza and SARS-CoV-2.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2022Article
- Epidemiological and ecological consequences of virus manipulation of host and vector in plant virus transmission.PLoS computational biology · 2021Article
- Reconstructing contact network structure and cross-immunity patterns from multiple infection histories.PLoS computational biology · 2021Article
- The Epidemiology of Plant Virus Disease: Towards a New Synthesis.Plants (Basel, Switzerland) · 2020Review
- Evolutionary ecology of Lyme Borrelia.Infection, genetics and evolution : journal of molecular epidemiology and evolutionary genetics in infectious diseases · 2020Review
- Predicting N-Strain Coexistence from Co-colonization Interactions: Epidemiology Meets Ecology and the Replicator Equation.Bulletin of mathematical biology · 2020Article
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Authors and funding
10 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
If pathogen species, strains, or clones do not interact, intuition suggests the proportion of coinfected hosts should be the product of the individual prevalences. Independence consequently underpins the wide range of methods for detecting pathogen interactions from cross-sectional survey data. However, the very simplest of epidemiological models challenge the underlying assumption of statistical independence. Even if pathogens do not interact, death of coinfected hosts causes net prevalences of individual pathogens to decrease simultaneously. The induced positive correlation between prevalences means the proportion of coinfected hosts is expected to be higher than multiplication would suggest. By modelling the dynamics of multiple noninteracting pathogens causing chronic infections, we develop a pair of novel tests of interaction that properly account for nonindependence between pathogens causing lifelong infection. Our tests allow us to reinterpret data from previous studies including pathogens of humans, plants, and animals. Our work demonstrates how methods to identify interactions between pathogens can be updated using simple epidemic models.
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