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COMMUNITY LEVEL ANALYSIS OF VECTOR-BORNE DISEASE
Citation:
OrmeZavaleta, J AND P. A. Rossignol. COMMUNITY LEVEL ANALYSIS OF VECTOR-BORNE DISEASE. Presented at Natural Science and Public Health: Prescription for a Better Environment, Reston, VA, April 1-3, 2003.
Description:
The role of ecological community structure of a communicable disease is a key factor in understanding the risk to public health of disease emergency, the mode of transmission, and control options (Forget and Lebel, 2001). Deterministic and stochastic models have been important in developing and characterizing our current understanding of ecological relationships with vector-borne diseases. However, these models often focus on population dynamics, by-passing a direct consideration of community level interactions. In diseases restricted to human hosts, this focus may be of benefit in understanding transmission, but in zoonotic diseases in particular, important community-level considerations may be lost. Qualitative community models (Levins, 1995) may, however, provide a meaningful alternative to modeling transmission of vector-borne disease. We build on recent mathematical developments in community ecology coupled with conventional biomathematical models of vector-borne disease transmission to provide new procedures to predict changes in risk. This approach predicts the change in risk of vector-borne disease from perturbations such as anthropogenic habitat alteration or global warming.