Institute of Biodiversity, Animal Health and Comparative Medicine, University of Glasgow, Glasgow, UK.
Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Princeton University, Princeton, NJ, USA.
Science. 2022 Apr 29;376(6592):512-516. doi: 10.1126/science.abn0713. Epub 2022 Apr 28.
How acute pathogens persist and what curtails their epidemic growth in the absence of acquired immunity remains unknown. Canine rabies is a fatal zoonosis that circulates endemically at low prevalence among domestic dogs in low- and middle-income countries. We traced rabies transmission in a population of 50,000 dogs in Tanzania from 2002 to 2016 and applied individual-based models to these spatially resolved data to investigate the mechanisms modulating transmission and the scale over which they operate. Although rabies prevalence never exceeded 0.15%, the best-fitting models demonstrated appreciable depletion of susceptible animals that occurred at local scales because of clusters of deaths and dogs already incubating infection. Individual variation in rabid dog behavior facilitated virus dispersal and cocirculation of virus lineages, enabling metapopulation persistence. These mechanisms have important implications for prediction and control of pathogens that circulate in spatially structured populations.
急性病原体是如何持续存在的，以及在没有获得性免疫的情况下是什么限制了它们的流行增长，目前仍不清楚。犬狂犬病是一种致命的人畜共患病，在中低收入国家的家养犬中流行率低，呈地方性流行。我们从 2002 年至 2016 年追踪了坦桑尼亚一个 5 万只犬的群体中的狂犬病传播，并将基于个体的模型应用于这些空间分辨率数据，以研究调节传播的机制及其作用范围。尽管狂犬病的流行率从未超过 0.15%，但最佳拟合模型表明，由于死亡集群和已经处于潜伏期的动物，易感动物在当地范围内大量减少。患有狂犬病的狗的个体行为变化促进了病毒的传播和病毒谱系的共同循环，使种群得以持续存在。这些机制对预测和控制在空间结构种群中传播的病原体具有重要意义。
