Variable immunity and its consequences for parasite dynamics
type: CreativeWork
description: Infectious disease represents a growing concern for our developing world. Human diseases result in morbidity, mortality, and suffering. Agricultural diseases can decimate food resources, leading to starvation and economic instability. Wildlife diseases affect the abundance and distribution of species, destabilizing the natural ecosystems on which we rely. Despite these varied contexts, infectious diseases can be united by three common factors: susceptible hosts, parasites, and environmental conditions. Over the past three decades, disease ecology has provided overwhelming evidence that environmental conditions can shape disease risk by altering host-parasite interactions. For example, shifting global temperatures can increase the density of pathogen vectors, thereby increasing pathogen transmission to humans. Such work has long relied on simple mass action principles of transmission, where infections are driven by rates of exposure and hosts are ascribed a single value denoting their susceptibility to infection. However, accumulating evidence suggests that this single value is biologically unrealistic, with most organisms exhibiting considerable variation in their natural levels of susceptibility. Moreover, theoretical models predict that variation in susceptibility can have profound consequences for the spread of disease. Connecting variable susceptibility to its epidemiological outcomes has become an emerging goal in ecology which I have addressed using observation, modeling, and experiments. At the heart of host susceptibility is the immune response. All living organisms are threatened with parasites and, in turn, utilize a suite of immunological defenses to prevent infection. Because immune defenses are important for defeating infections at the individual level, they may also present a barrier to disease transmission at the population level. I have investigated immune defenses and their consequences for parasites in an aquatic host-parasite system: the zooplankt…
abstract: Infectious disease represents a growing concern for our developing world. Human diseases result in morbidity, mortality, and suffering. Agricultural diseases can decimate food resources, leading to starvation and economic instability. Wildlife diseases affect the abundance and distribution of species, destabilizing the natural ecosystems on which we rely. Despite these varied contexts, infectious diseases can be united by three common factors: susceptible hosts, parasites, and environmental conditions. Over the past three decades, disease ecology has provided overwhelming evidence that environmental conditions can shape disease risk by altering host-parasite interactions. For example, shifting global temperatures can increase the density of pathogen vectors, thereby increasing pathogen transmission to humans. Such work has long relied on simple mass action principles of transmission, where infections are driven by rates of exposure and hosts are ascribed a single value denoting their susceptibility to infection. However, accumulating evidence suggests that this single value is biologically unrealistic, with most organisms exhibiting considerable variation in their natural levels of susceptibility. Moreover, theoretical models predict that variation in susceptibility can have profound consequences for the spread of disease. Connecting variable susceptibility to its epidemiological outcomes has become an emerging goal in ecology which I have addressed using observation, modeling, and experiments. At the heart of host susceptibility is the immune response. All living organisms are threatened with parasites and, in turn, utilize a suite of immunological defenses to prevent infection. Because immune defenses are important for defeating infections at the individual level, they may also present a barrier to disease transmission at the population level. I have investigated immune defenses and their consequences for parasites in an aquatic host-parasite system: the zooplankt…
author: Stewart Merrill, Tara E.
language: en
keywords: Susceptibility, immunity, disease, parasite, transmission, ecological immunology, invertebrate immunology, Daphnia, Metschnikowia, epidemic, Markov model
date published: 2019-11-26T20:49:23Z
date modified: 2026-07-22T22:24:45Z
provider: University of Illinois - Urbana-Champaign
publisher: Networked Digital Library of Theses and Dissertations
type: WebPage
source organization: University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

PropertyValue
property ID: Handle
value: http://hdl.handle.net/2142/105796