ArticleProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America2022
Transmission potential of human schistosomes can be driven by resource competition among snail intermediate hosts.
Article in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2022. 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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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.
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Who cites it
19 citing papers in PubMed, 1 synthesis or guideline pooled it, 53 citations in OpenAlex.
- Host-pathogen interactions under pressure: A review and meta-analysis of stress-mediated effects on disease dynamics.Ecology letters · 2023Pooled it
- REVIEW: THE ORIGIN OF DIGENETIC TREMATODES: DID THE STORY BEGIN WITH THE BLOOD FLUKES?The Journal of parasitology · 2025Review
- A case of schistosomiasis and healthcare seeking in Mwanza, Tanzania.Trends in parasitology · 2025Article
- Stocking African catfish in Lake Victoria provides effective biocontrol of snail vectors of Schistosoma mansoni.PLoS neglected tropical diseases · 2025Article
- Genes linked to schistosome resistance identified in a genome-wide association study of African snail vectors.Nature communications · 2025Article
- Population-level impact of mass drug administration against schistosomiasis with anthelmintic drugs targeting juvenile schistosomes: a modelling study.The Lancet. Microbe · 2025Article
- Human Schistosoma exposure risk in rice fields and an exploration of fish species for snail and schistosomiasis biocontrol.PLOS global public health · 2025Article
- Mapping of snail intermediate host habitats reveals variability in schistosome and non-schistosome trematode transmission in an endemic setting.Current research in parasitology & vector-borne diseases · 2025Article
- Diet of schistosome vectors influences infection outcomes.Ecosphere (Washington, D.C) · 2024Article
- The abundance of snail hosts mediates the effects of antagonist interactions between trematodes on the transmission of human schistosomes.Infectious diseases of poverty · 2024Article
- Revisiting the impact of Schistosoma mansoni regulating mechanisms on transmission dynamics using SchiSTOP, a novel modelling framework.PLoS neglected tropical diseases · 2024Article
- Parasite transmission in size-structured populations.Ecology · 2024Article
- Schistosoma transmission: scaling-up competence from hosts to ecosystems.Trends in parasitology · 2023Review
- Infection burdens and virulence under heat stress: ecological and evolutionary considerations.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2023Review
- Status Quo and Future Perspectives of Molecular and Genomic Studies on the GenusInternational journal of molecular sciences · 2023Review
- Experimental water hyacinth invasion and destructive management increase human schistosome transmission potential.Ecological applications : a publication of the Ecological Society of America · 2023Article
- Multi-strain compatibility polymorphism between a parasite and its snail host, a neglected vector of schistosomiasis in Africa.Current research in parasitology & vector-borne diseases · 2023Article
- Snail juvenile growth rate as a rapid predictor of the transmission potential of parasitizing human schistosomes.Experimental parasitology · 2022Article
- Nutritional effects of invasive macrophyte detritus onHydrobiologia · 2022Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
13 authors at 6 institutions in 2 countries.
Funding
Abstract
Predicting and disrupting transmission of human parasites from wildlife hosts or vectors remains challenging because ecological interactions can influence their epidemiological traits. Human schistosomes, parasitic flatworms that cycle between freshwater snails and humans, typify this challenge. Human exposure risk, given water contact, is driven by the production of free-living cercariae by snail populations. Conventional epidemiological models and management focus on the density of infected snails under the assumption that all snails are equally infectious. However, individual-level experiments contradict this assumption, showing increased production of schistosome cercariae with greater access to food resources. We built bioenergetics theory to predict how resource competition among snails drives the temporal dynamics of transmission potential to humans and tested these predictions with experimental epidemics and demonstrated consistency with field observations. This resource-explicit approach predicted an intense pulse of transmission potential when snail populations grow from low densities, i.e., when per capita access to resources is greatest, due to the resource-dependence of cercarial production. The experiment confirmed this prediction, identifying a strong effect of infected host size and the biomass of competitors on per capita cercarial production. A field survey of 109 waterbodies also found that per capita cercarial production decreased as competitor biomass increased. Further quantification of snail densities, sizes, cercarial production, and resources in diverse transmission sites is needed to assess the epidemiological importance of resource competition and support snail-based disruption of schistosome transmission. More broadly, this work illustrates how resource competition can sever the correspondence between infectious host density and transmission potential.
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