ArticleProceedings. Biological sciences2022
The source of individual heterogeneity shapes infectious disease outbreaks.
Article in Proceedings. Biological sciences, 2022. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 13 papers.
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Who cites it
13 citing papers in PubMed.
- Infected host competence overshadows heterogeneity in susceptibility in shaping experimental epizootics.Ecology · 2026Article
- Prior pathogen exposure augments inter-individual heterogeneity in antibody levels and reinfection loads in a songbird-pathogen system.Scientific reports · 2026Article
- Host Prior Exposure Augments Gene Expression Heterogeneity of Both Host and Pathogen During In Vivo Infection.Molecular ecology · 2026Article
- Infected host competence overshadows heterogeneity in susceptibility in shaping experimental epizootics.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2025Article
- Host prior exposure augments heterogeneity in gene expression in both host and pathogen duringbioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2025Article
- The ghost of infections past: Accounting for heterogeneity in individual infection history improves accuracy in epidemic forecasting.PLoS biology · 2025Article
- Reinfection with a Bacterial Pathogen Augments Heterogeneity in Host Disease Responses.Research square · 2025Article
- Quantitative Resistance Deployment Can Strengthen Epidemics in Perennial Plants by Selecting Maladapted Pathogen Strains.Evolutionary applications · 2025Article
- Latent class analysis identifies risk groups to model the expected benefits of SARS-CoV-2 interventions among university students.Scientific reports · 2025Article
- Article
- The influence of social and spatial processes on the epidemiology of environmentally transmitted pathogens in wildlife: implications for management.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2024Article
- Estimating the reproduction number and transmission heterogeneity from the size distribution of clusters of identical pathogen sequences.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2024Article
- Case clustering, contact stratification, and transmission heterogeneity of SARS-CoV-2 Omicron BA.5 variants in Urumqi, China: An observational study.Journal of global health · 2023Observational
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3 authors.
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No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
There is known heterogeneity between individuals in infectious disease transmission patterns. The source of this heterogeneity is thought to affect epidemiological dynamics but studies tend not to control for the overall heterogeneity in the number of secondary cases caused by an infection. To explore the role of individual variation in infection duration and transmission rate in parasite emergence and spread, while controlling for this potential bias, we simulate stochastic outbreaks with and without parasite evolution. As expected, heterogeneity in the number of secondary cases decreases the probability of outbreak emergence. Furthermore, for epidemics that do emerge, assuming more realistic infection duration distributions leads to faster outbreaks and higher epidemic peaks. When parasites require adaptive mutations to cause large epidemics, the impact of heterogeneity depends on the underlying evolutionary model. If emergence relies on within-host evolution, decreasing the infection duration variance decreases the probability of emergence. These results underline the importance of accounting for realistic distributions of transmission rates to anticipate the effect of individual heterogeneity on epidemiological dynamics.
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