Transmission of bovine herpesvirus 1 (BHV1) within and between herds was studied on the island of Ameland, The Netherlands. There were 50 herds with 3300 head of cattle on the island. Herds were divided into three groups: (1) only containing seronegative cattle, (2) containing seronegative cattle and vaccinated seropositive cattle, and (3) containing only vaccinated cattle. All 23 herds in grou...

Heterogeneity in the number of potentially infectious contacts and connectivity correlations ("like attaches to like", i.e., assortatively mixed or "opposites attract", i.e., disassortatively mixed) have important implications for the value of the basic reproduction ratio R(0) and final epidemic size. In this paper, we present a contact-network-based derivation of a simple differential equation...

We investigate the in-hospital transmission dynamics of two methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA) strains: hospital-acquired methicillin resistant S. aureus (HA-MRSA) and community-acquired methicillin-resistant S. aureus (CA-MRSA). Under the assumption that patients can only be colonized with one strain of MRSA at a time, global results show that competitive exclusion occurs betwe...

A multi-group semi-stochastic model is formulated to describe Salmonella dynamics on a pig herd within the UK and assess whether farm structure has any effect on the dynamics. The models include both direct transmission and indirect (via free-living infectious units in the environment and airborne infection). The basic reproduction number R0 is also investigated. The models estimate approximate...

Six successive transmission trials were carried out from 4 to 39 days post inoculation (DPI) to determine the features of the infectious period for PCV2-infected pigs. The infectiousness of inoculated pigs, assessed from the frequency of occurrence of infected pigs in susceptible groups in each contact trial, increased from 4 to 18 DPI (0, 7 and 8 infected pigs at 4, 11 and 18 DPI, respectively...

In this paper we develop a mathematical model for Chagas disease with infection-age-dependent infectivity. The effects of vector and blood transfusion transmission are considered, and the infected population is structured by the infection age (the time elapsed from infection). The authors identify the basic reproduction ratio R0 and show that the disease can invade into the susceptible populati...

Solicitation signals by offspring are well known to influence parental behaviour, and it is commonly assumed that this behavioural effect translates into an effect on residual reproduction of parents. However, this equivalence assumption concerning behavioural and reproductive effects caused by offspring signals remains largely untested. Here, we tested the effect of a chemical offspring signal...

Since there exist extrinsic and intrinsic incubation periods of pathogens in the feedback interactions between the vectors and hosts, it is necessary to consider the incubation delays in vector-host disease transmission dynamics. In this paper, we propose vector-host disease models with two time delays, one describing the incubation period in the vector population and another representing the i...

This paper explains why the traditional approach of predicting evolutionary outcomes by maximizing the basic reproduction ratio of a disease is not always appropriate. Since pathogens tend to affect their host environment in radical ways, selection pressures usually depend on the types of pathogens and hosts that are established in an infected population. After outlining the theory of adaptive ...

Based on a simple model due to Dietz, it is shown that the size of a major epidemic of a vector-borne disease with basic reproduction ratio R0 > 1 is dominated by the size of a standard SIR (susceptible–infected–removed) epidemic with direct host-to-host transmission of disease and the same R0. Further bounds and numerical illustrations are provided, broadly spanning situations where the size o...