Quantifying Transmission Investment in Malaria Parasites.

ABSTRACT: Many microparasites infect new hosts with specialized life stages, requiring a subset of the parasite population to forgo proliferation and develop into transmission forms. Transmission stage production influences infectivity, host exploitation, and the impact of medical interventions like drug treatment. Predicting how parasites will respond to public health efforts on both epidemiological and evolutionary timescales requires understanding transmission strategies. These strategies can rarely be observed directly and must typically be inferred from infection dynamics. Using malaria as a case study, we test previously described methods for inferring transmission stage investment against simulated data generated with a model of within-host infection dynamics, where the true transmission inve

SUBMITTER: Greischar MA 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC4759450 | biostudies-literature | 2016 Feb

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature