Strong seasonality produces spatial asynchrony in the outbreak of infectious diseases |
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Authors: | Scott M. Duke-Sylvester Luca Bolzoni Leslie A. Real |
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Affiliation: | 1Department of Biology and Center for Disease Ecology, Emory University, 1510 Clifton Road, Atlanta, GA 30322, USA;2Department of Biology, University of Louisiana at Lafayette, Lafayette, LA 70504, USA;3Dipartimento di Scienze Ambientali, Università degli Studi di Parma, viale Usberti, 11/A 43100 Parma, Italy;4Fogarty International Center, National Institutes of Health, Bethesda, MD 20892, USA |
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Abstract: | Models for infectious diseases usually assume a fixed demographic structure. Yet, a disease can spread over a region encountering different local demographic variations that may significantly alter local dynamics. Spatial heterogeneity in the resulting dynamics can lead to important differences in the design of surveillance and control strategies. We illustrate this by exploring the north–south gradient in the seasonal demography of raccoon rabies over the eastern USA. We find that the greater variance in the timing of spring births characteristic of southern populations can lead to the spatial synchronization of southern epidemics, while the narrow birth-pulse associated with northern populations can lead to an irregular patchwork of epidemics. These results indicate that surveillance in the southern states can be reduced relative to northern locations without loss of detection ability. This approach could yield significant savings in vaccination programmes. The importance of seasonality in many widely distributed diseases indicates that our findings will find applications beyond raccoon rabies. |
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Keywords: | seasonality infectious disease spatial dynamics spatial synchronization rabies latitudinal gradient |
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