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How will public and animal health interventions drive life-history evolution in parasitic nematodes?

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  10 March 2008

PENELOPE A. LYNCH ,
UWE GRIMM  and
ANDREW F. READ
PENELOPE A. LYNCH*
Affiliation:
Department of Mathematics, The Open University, Walton Hall, Milton Keynes MK7 6AA, UK Institutes of Evolutionary Biology & Immunology and Infection Research, School of Biological Sciences, University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh EH9 3JT, UK
UWE GRIMM
Affiliation:
Department of Mathematics, The Open University, Walton Hall, Milton Keynes MK7 6AA, UK
ANDREW F. READ
Affiliation:
Institutes of Evolutionary Biology & Immunology and Infection Research, School of Biological Sciences, University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh EH9 3JT, UK Current address: Centre for Infectious Disease Dynamics, Departments of Biology & Entomology, The Pennsylvania State University, University Park PA 16802-5301, USA
*
*Corresponding author – pennymath@lynch-fm.demon.co.uk
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Summary

Infection caused by parasitic nematodes of humans and livestock can have significant health and economic costs. Treatments aimed at alleviating these costs, such as chemotherapy and vaccination, alter parasite survival and reproduction, the main selective pressures shaping life-history traits such as age to maturity, size and fecundity. Most authors have argued that the life-history evolution prompted by animal and public health programmes would be clinically beneficial, generating smaller, less fecund worms, and several mathematical models support this view. However, using mathematical models of long-lasting interventions, such as vaccination, and regularly repeated short interventions, such as drenching, we show here that the expected outcome actually depends on how mortality rates vary as a function of worm size and developmental status. Interventions which change mortality functions can exert selection pressure to either shorten or extend the time to maturity, and thus increase or decrease worm fecundity and size. The evolutionary trajectory depends critically on the details of the mortality functions with and without the intervention. Earlier optimism that health interventions would always prompt the evolution of smaller, less fecund and hence clinically less damaging worms is premature.

Keywords

mortality rateshealth interventionsmaturation timevaccinationchemotherapyanthelminthic
Type
Research Article
Information
Parasitology , Volume 135 , Special Issue 13: Mathematical modelling of parasitic infections: from data and parameter estimation to evolutionary implications , November 2008 , pp. 1599 - 1611
Copyright
Copyright © 2008 Cambridge University Press

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