ArticleBulletin of mathematical biology2026
Virulence Evolution in Host Populations with Heterogeneous Immune Responses: The Weakening of the Uncommon Weak.
Article in Bulletin of mathematical biology, 2026. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Not yet cited in PubMed.
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.
The trial behind it
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
0 citing papers in PubMed.
No citing paper in PubMed yet.
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
2 authors.
Funding
Abstract
How and to what extent different factors in pathogen-host dynamics shape virulence has been largely debated due to evolutionary forces acting in opposite directions. Here we present a model of pathogen-host dynamics with the aim of studying how competition between pathogens and the immune response of the host affect virulence. The model describes, and links, the pathogen dynamics inside individual hosts and the dynamics of the susceptible and infected individuals in the host population. We first show that when the hosts have an adequate immune response (so that they completely recover from the infection on a short time scale), pathogens tend to increase their virulence. On the contrary, if the hosts are vulnerable (meaning that they will eventually die from the infection), low virulences will be selected. We then move to a richer scenario in which the host population is mixed and contains a fraction p of vulnerable individuals. We see that the selected virulence exhibits biologically relevant behaviors as p takes intermediate values.
Indexed as
Identifiers
What OpenQuestion holds
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.