Physiology and ecology combine to determine host andvector importance for Ross River virus
Abstract
Identifying the key vector and host species that drive the transmission of zoonotic pathogens is notoriously difficult but critical for disease control. We present a nested approach for quantifying the importance of host and vectors that integrates species' physiological competence with their ecological traits. We apply this framework to a medically important arbovirus, Ross River virus (RRV), in Brisbane, Australia. We find that vertebrate hosts with high physiological competence are not the most important for community transmission; interactions between hosts and vectors largely underpin the importance of host species. For vectors, physiological competence is highly important. Our results identify primary and secondary vectors of RRV and suggest two potential transmission cycles in Brisbane: an enzootic cycle involving birds and an urban cycle involving humans. The framework accounts for uncertainty from each fitted statistical model in estimates of species' contributions to transmission and has has direct application to other zoonotic pathogens.
Data availability
All data analyzed and all code generated during this study are included in the manuscript and supporting files.
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Author details
Funding
National Science Foundation (DEB-1518681)
- Erin A Mordecai
Fogarty International Center (DEB-2011147)
- Erin A Mordecai
National Institute of General Medical Sciences (R35GM133439)
- Morgan P Kain
- Eloise B Skinner
- Erin A Mordecai
The funders had no role in study design, data collection and interpretation, or the decision to submit the work for publication.
Reviewing Editor
- Thomas S Churcher, Imperial College London, United Kingdom
Publication history
- Preprint posted: January 28, 2021 (view preprint)
- Received: January 28, 2021
- Accepted: August 19, 2021
- Accepted Manuscript published: August 20, 2021 (version 1)
- Version of Record published: September 22, 2021 (version 2)
Copyright
© 2021, Kain et al.
This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License permitting unrestricted use and redistribution provided that the original author and source are credited.
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