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Birds shed RNA-viruses according to the pareto principle
- Source :
- PLoS ONE, PLoS ONE, Vol 8, Iss 8, p e72611 (2013)
- Publication Year :
- 2013
-
Abstract
- A major challenge in disease ecology is to understand the role of individual variation of infection load on disease transmission dynamics and how this influences the evolution of resistance or tolerance mechanisms. Such information will improve our capacity to understand, predict, and mitigate pathogen-associated disease in all organisms. In many host-pathogen systems, particularly macroparasites and sexually transmitted diseases, it has been found that approximately 20% of the population is responsible for approximately 80% of the transmission events. Although host contact rates can account for some of this pattern, pathogen transmission dynamics also depend upon host infectiousness, an area that has received relatively little attention. Therefore, we conducted a meta-analysis of pathogen shedding rates of 24 host (avian) - pathogen (RNA-virus) studies, including 17 bird species and five important zoonotic viruses. We determined that viral count data followed the Weibull distribution, the mean Gini coefficient (an index of inequality) was 0.687 (0.036 SEM), and that 22.0% (0.90 SEM) of the birds shed 80% of the virus across all studies, suggesting an adherence of viral shedding counts to the Pareto Principle. The relative position of a bird in a distribution of viral counts was affected by factors extrinsic to the host, such as exposure to corticosterone and to a lesser extent reduced food availability, but not to intrinsic host factors including age, sex, and migratory status. These data provide a quantitative view of heterogeneous virus shedding in birds that may be used to better parameterize epidemiological models and understand transmission dynamics.
- Subjects :
- RNA viruses
Viral Diseases
Epidemiology
Science
030231 tropical medicine
Population
Zoology
Biology
Microbiology
Virus
Infectious Disease Epidemiology
Birds
03 medical and health sciences
0302 clinical medicine
Viral classification
Virology
Animals
Viral shedding
education
Pathogen
030304 developmental biology
0303 health sciences
education.field_of_study
Multidisciplinary
Population Biology
Ecology
Transmission (medicine)
Host (biology)
Zoonotic Diseases
Models, Theoretical
Viral Load
Virus Shedding
Infectious Diseases
Veterinary Diseases
Macroparasite
Medicine
Veterinary Science
Viral load
Viral Transmission and Infection
Research Article
Subjects
Details
- ISSN :
- 19326203
- Volume :
- 8
- Issue :
- 8
- Database :
- OpenAIRE
- Journal :
- PloS one
- Accession number :
- edsair.doi.dedup.....bc63f56754dcf4ab724a7938b9ebd4a1