Natural, Persistent Oscillations in a Spatial Multi-Strain Disease System with Application to Dengue
Figure 1
Epidemiological dynamics of a multi-strain system with homogeneous mixing.
(A) The simulated time series of an agent-based, multi-strain model of a directly transmitted pathogen show irregular oscillations in total (black lines, top graphs) and strain-specific (coloured lines, bottom graphs) even in the absence of immunological interactions or asymmetries between pathogen strains. (B) Changing the system to describe a vector-transmitted pathogen, including intrinsic and extrinsic incubation periods, results in an overall increase in mean incidence and decrease in the risk of stochastic extinction. (C) Further including seasonal variations in mosquito densities results in multi-annual epidemic outbreaks followed by severe transmission bottlenecks. Parameters are given in Materials and Methods (A) and in Table 1 (B and C, with in B).