Abstract
Despite their potential interplay, multiple routes of many disease transmissions are often investigated separately. As a unifying framework for understanding parasite spread through interdependent transmission paths, we present the 'ecomultiplex' model, where the multiple transmission paths among a diverse community of interacting hosts are represented as a spatially explicit multiplex network. We adopt this framework for designing and testing potential control strategies for Trypanosoma cruzi spread in two empirical host communities. We show that the ecomultiplex model is an efficient and low data-demanding method to identify which species enhances parasite spread and should thus be a target for control strategies. We also find that the interplay between predator-prey and host-parasite interactions leads to a phenomenon of parasite amplification, in which top predators facilitate T. cruzi spread, offering a mechanistic interpretation of previous empirical findings. Our approach can provide novel insights in understanding and controlling parasite spreading in real-world complex systems.
Highlights
Zoonoses are infections naturally transmitted between animals and humans, and are the most important cause of emerging and re-emerging diseases in humans (Perkins et al, 2005; Jones et al, 2008; Lloyd-Smith et al, 2009)
We propose to address this challenge through the mathematical framework of multiplex networks (De Domenico et al, 2013; Kivela et al, 2014; Boccaletti et al, 2014; De Domenico et al, 2016; Battiston et al, 2016), which have been successfully applied to epidemiology (Lima et al, 2015; De Domenico et al, 2016; Sanz et al, 2014) and ecology (Sonia Kefi et al, 2015; Kefi et al, 2016; Pilosof et al, 2017; Stella et al, 2016)
We study the ecology of multi-host parasite spread by multiple routes of transmission and potential control strategies by developing the ‘ecomultiplex’ framework, Figure 1
Summary
Zoonoses are infections naturally transmitted between animals and humans, and are the most important cause of emerging and re-emerging diseases in humans (Perkins et al, 2005; Jones et al, 2008; Lloyd-Smith et al, 2009). The majority of the zoonotic agents are multi-host pathogens or parasites (Ostfeld and Holt, 2004; Alexander et al, 2012), whose various host species may differ in their contribution to parasite transmission and persistence over space and time (Jansen et al, 2015; Rushmore et al, 2014). This heterogeneity of host species contribution to parasite transmission is related to differences in host species’ abundance, exposure and susceptibility to infection (Haydon et al, 2002; Altizer et al, 2003; Streicker et al, 2013). T. cruzi has already been found in more than 100 mammalian species and its transmission may be mediated by several interdependent
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