Abstract
The spread of pathogens fundamentally depends on the underlying contacts between individuals. Modeling the dynamics of infectious disease spread through contact networks, however, can be challenging due to limited knowledge of how an infectious disease spreads and its transmission rate. We developed a novel statistical tool, INoDS (Identifying contact Networks of infectious Disease Spread) that estimates the transmission rate of an infectious disease outbreak, establishes epidemiological relevance of a contact network in explaining the observed pattern of infectious disease spread and enables model comparison between different contact network hypotheses. We show that our tool is robust to incomplete data and can be easily applied to datasets where infection timings of individuals are unknown. We tested the reliability of INoDS using simulation experiments of disease spread on a synthetic contact network and find that it is robust to incomplete data and is reliable under different settings of network dynamics and disease contagiousness compared with previous approaches. We demonstrate the applicability of our method in two host-pathogen systems: Crithidia bombi in bumblebee colonies and Salmonella in wild Australian sleepy lizard populations. INoDS thus provides a novel and reliable statistical tool for identifying transmission pathways of infectious disease spread. In addition, application of INoDS extends to understanding the spread of novel or emerging infectious disease, an alternative approach to laboratory transmission experiments, and overcoming common data-collection constraints.
Highlights
Host contacts, whether direct or indirect, play a fundamental role in the spread of infectious diseases [1,2,3,4]
The choice of network model often relies on subjective expert knowledge or disease transmission experiments that are time-consuming and difficult to perform
We developed a novel tool, called INoDS (Identifying contact Networks of infectious Disease Spread), that uses robust statistical approach to establish relevance of a network model in explaining transmission pathways of an infectious disease
Summary
Whether direct or indirect, play a fundamental role in the spread of infectious diseases [1,2,3,4]. Traditional epidemiological models make assumptions of homogeneous social structure and mixing among hosts which can yield unreliable predictions of infectious disease spread [3, 5,6,7]. In a contact network model, individuals are represented as nodes, and an edge between two nodes represents an interaction that has the potential to transmit infection. Constructing a complete contact network model requires (i) knowledge about the transmission route(s) of a pathogen, (ii) a sampling of all individuals in a population, and (iii) a sampling of all interactions among the sampled individuals that may lead to infection transfer. Accuracy of disease predictions depends on the precise epidemiological knowledge about the pathogen, including the rate of pathogen transfer given a contact between two individuals, and the rate of recovery of infected individuals
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