Consilience in Disease Ecology: FMDV Transmission Dynamics Reflect Viral Growth and Immune Response RATES *

Abstract

AbstractInfectious disease dynamics operate across biological scales: pathogens replicate within hosts, but transmit among hosts and populations. Functional changes in the pathogen-host interaction thus generate cascading effects from molecular to landscape scales. We investigated within-host dynamics and among-host transmission of three strains of foot-and-mouth disease viruses (FMDVs) in their wildlife host, African buffalo. We combined data on viral dynamics and host immune responses with mathematical models to ask (i) How do viral and immune dynamics vary among FMDV strains? (SAT1, 2, 3); (ii) Which viral and immune parameters determine viral fitness within hosts?; and (iii) How do within-host dynamics relate to virus transmission among hosts? Our data reveal contrasting within-host dynamics among viral strains. However, SAT2 elicited more rapid and effective immune responses than SAT1 and SAT3. Within-host viral fitness was overwhelmingly determined by variation among hosts in immune response activation rates against FMDVs, but not by variation among individual hosts in viral growth rate. By contrast, our analyses investigating across-scale linkages indicate that viral replication rate in the host correlates with transmission rates among buffalo; and that adaptive immune activation rate determines the infectious period. Together, these parameters define the basic reproductive number,, of the virus, suggesting that viral invasion potential may be predictable from within-host dynamics. Future work should test the generality of these findings by including additional FMDV strains, and create a multi-scale model to link within-host and between-host dynamics explicitly.