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How should environmental stress affect the population dynamics of disease?
Open accessAbstract
We modelled how stress affects the population dynamics of infectious disease. We were specifically concerned with stress that increased susceptibility of uninfected hosts when exposed to infection. If such stresses also reduced resources, fecundity and/or survivorship, there was a reduction in the host carrying capacity. This lowered the contact between infected and uninfected hosts, thereby decreasing transmission. In addition, stress that increased parasite mortality decreased disease. The opposing effects of stress on disease dynamics made it difficult to predict the response of disease to environmental stress. We found analytical solutions with negative, positive, convex and concave associations between disease and stress. Numerical simulations with randomly generated parameter values suggested that the impact of host‐specific diseases generally declined with stress while the impact of non‐specific (or open) diseases increased with stress. These results help clarify predictions about the interaction between environmental stress and disease in natural populations.
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Citations
Cited by
Thermal Stress and Coral Cover as Drivers of Coral Disease Outbreaks
Bruno, J. F., Selig, E. R., Casey, K. S., Page, C. A., Willis, B. L., Harvell, C. D., Sweatman, H., & Melendy, A. M. (2007) · PLoS Biology · doi:10.1371/journal.pbio.0050124 · Cited by 873
Emerging human infectious diseases and the links to global food production
Rohr, J. R., Barrett, C. B., Civitello, D. J., Craft, M. E., Delius, B., DeLeo, G. A., Hudson, P. J., Jouanard, N., Nguyen, K. H., Ostfeld, R. S., et al. (2019) · Nature Sustainability · doi:10.1038/s41893-019-0293-3 · Cited by 722
Population Dynamics of Pathogens with Multiple Host Species
Dobson, A. (2004) · The American Naturalist · doi:10.1086/424681 · Cited by 567
Evidence for the Role of Infectious Disease in Species Extinction and Endangerment
SMITH, K. F., SAX, D. F., & LAFFERTY, K. D. (2006) · Conservation Biology · doi:10.1111/j.1523-1739.2006.00524.x · Cited by 548
Self-citationDoes biodiversity protect humans against infectious disease?
Wood, C. L., Lafferty, K. D., DeLeo, G., Young, H. S., Hudson, P. J., & Kuris, A. M. (2014) · Ecology · doi:10.1890/13-1041.1 · Cited by 268
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Metadata
- Authors
- Lafferty, K. D., & Holt, R. D.
- Venue
- Ecology Letters
- Publisher
- Wiley
- Published
- 2003-06-13
- Volume
- 6
- Issue
- 7
- Pages
- 654-664
- ISSN
- 1461-023X (ISSN-L)
- 1461-0248
- OpenAlex
- W2130380405
- Cited by
- 344
- References
- 0
- FWCI
- 10.22
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- green
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Contains information from the Semantic Scholar Academic Graph Datasets, made available under the ODC Attribution License (ODC-BY 1.0).
Semantic Scholar’s data is described in: Kinney, R., et al. (2023). The Semantic Scholar Open Data Platform. arXiv:2301.10140.
