Department of Biological Sciences, Old Dominion University, 110 MGB, Norfolk, Virginia 23529, USA.
Math Biosci Eng. 2013 Jun;10(3):625-35. doi: 10.3934/mbe.2013.10.625.
Ticks and tick-borne diseases have been on the move throughout the United State over the past twenty years. We use an agent-based model, TICKSIM, to identify the key parameters that determine the success of invasion of the tick and if that is successful, the succees of the tick-borne pathogen. We find that if an area has competent hosts, an initial population of ten ticks is predicted to always establish a new population. The establishment of the tick-borne pathogen depends on three parameters: the initial prevalence in the ten founding ticks, the probability that a tick infects the longer-lived hosts and the probability that a tick infects the shorter-lived hosts. These results indicate that the transmission rates to hosts in the newly established area can be used to predict the potential risk of disease to humans.
在过去的二十年中，蜱虫和蜱传疾病在美国各地蔓延。我们使用基于代理的模型 TICKSIM 来确定决定蜱虫入侵成功的关键参数，如果入侵成功，则确定蜱传病原体的成功。我们发现，如果一个地区有能力胜任的宿主，预测最初有 10 只蜱虫的情况下，总是会建立一个新的种群。蜱传病原体的建立取决于三个参数：在最初的 10 只创始蜱虫中流行的初始概率、蜱虫感染寿命较长的宿主的概率以及蜱虫感染寿命较短的宿主的概率。这些结果表明，可以利用新建立地区的宿主传播率来预测人类疾病的潜在风险。
