Emerging epidemics

Emerging norms for the control of emerging epidemics.

doi:10.2471/BLT.08.051771 (Submitted: 31 January 2008 – Revised version received: 23 April 2008 – Accepted: 27 May 2008 ) Introduction Recent WHO initiatives, including the revised International Health Regulations (IHR),1 the final report on Ethical considerations in developing a public health response to pandemic influenza 2 and the interim protocol on Rapid operations to contain the init ial ...

Comparing nonpharmaceutical interventions for containing emerging epidemics.

Strategies for containing an emerging infectious disease outbreak must be nonpharmaceutical when drugs or vaccines for the pathogen do not yet exist or are unavailable. The success of these nonpharmaceutical strategies will depend on not only the effectiveness of isolation measures but also the epidemiological characteristics of the infection. However, there is currently no systematic framework...

Evolution of Virulence in Emerging Epidemics

Theory predicts that selection for pathogen virulence and horizontal transmission is highest at the onset of an epidemic but decreases thereafter, as the epidemic depletes the pool of susceptible hosts. We tested this prediction by tracking the competition between the latent bacteriophage λ and its virulent mutant λcI857 throughout experimental epidemics taking place in continuous cultures of E...

Unifying the spatial epidemiology and molecular evolution of emerging epidemics.

We introduce a conceptual bridge between the previously unlinked fields of phylogenetics and mathematical spatial ecology, which enables the spatial parameters of an emerging epidemic to be directly estimated from sampled pathogen genome sequences. By using phylogenetic history to correct for spatial autocorrelation, we illustrate how a fundamental spatial variable, the diffusion coefficient, c...

Supporting information for “Evolution of virulence in emerging epidemics”