Revealing mechanisms of infectious disease spread through empirical contact networks

by Pratha Sah, Michael Otterstatter, Stephan T. Leu, Sivan Leviyang, Shweta Bansal 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 develop ed 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 enable s 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 synthet ic 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 o...
Source: PLoS Computational Biology - Category: Biology Authors: Source Type: research