Hopkins Marine Station, Stanford University, Pacific Grove, CA, USA.
U.S. Geological Survey, Western Ecological Research Center, at Marine Science Institute, University of California, Santa Barbara, CA, USA.
Sci Rep. 2020 Apr 6;10(1):5975. doi: 10.1038/s41598-020-62118-4.
The first signs of sea star wasting disease (SSWD) epidemic occurred in just few months in 2013 along the entire North American Pacific coast. Disease dynamics did not manifest as the typical travelling wave of reaction-diffusion epidemiological model, suggesting that other environmental factors might have played some role. To help explore how external factors might trigger disease, we built a coupled oceanographic-epidemiological model and contrasted three hypotheses on the influence of temperature on disease transmission and pathogenicity. Models that linked mortality to sea surface temperature gave patterns more consistent with observed data on sea star wasting disease, which suggests that environmental stress could explain why some marine diseases seem to spread so fast and have region-wide impacts on host populations.
海星消瘦病（SSWD）疫情于 2013 年在北美太平洋沿岸几个月内迅速蔓延。疾病的传播动态并没有呈现出典型的反应扩散流行病学模型的传播波，这表明其他环境因素可能也起到了一定的作用。为了探究外部因素如何引发疾病，我们建立了一个耦合的海洋-流行病学模型，并对比了三种关于温度对疾病传播和致病性影响的假说。将死亡率与海面温度联系起来的模型与观察到的海星消瘦病数据更为一致，这表明环境压力可以解释为什么有些海洋疾病似乎传播得如此之快，并对宿主种群产生区域范围的影响。
