Agenda de l’IDP

Séminaire d'Analyse

Dynamics at the edge of neutrality: how direct competition mediates coexistence and vaccine effects in multi-strain pathogen systems
Erida Gjini
Tuesday 08 December 2015 14:00 -  Tours -  Salle 1180 (Bât E2)

Résumé :
In this talk I will describe an integrated modeling framework to understand strain coexistence in polymorphic pathogen systems. Instead of cross-immunity between strains as a stabilizing mechanism, here we focus on direct competition for colonization and pairwise interaction asymmetries. We develop epidemiological models based on ODEs for single and dual colonization, and apply them to polymorphic pneumococcal bacteria. By fitting the models to prevalence data from Portugal (before and after the introduction of a vaccine), we compare neutral and non-neutral epidemiological formulations, and estimate vaccine efficacy, transmission and competition parameters simultaneously. This study highlights that the response of pathogen systems to interventions holds crucial information about strain interactions, which can be extracted by mathematical models.

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