Identifying Reservoirs of Infection: A Conceptual and Practical Challenge
Why is this work in the frame?
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
No Canadian affiliation. An affiliation-only frame — the usual design — would never have seen this work. It is one of the works that make the case for inverting the frame.
Abstract
Many infectious agents, especially those that cause emerging diseases, infect more than one host species. Managing reservoirs of multihost pathogens often plays a crucial role in effective disease control. However, reservoirs remain variously and loosely defined. We propose that reservoirs can only be understood with reference to defined target populations. Therefore, we define a reservoir as one or more epidemiologically connected populations or environments in which the pathogen can be permanently maintained and from which infection is transmitted to the defined target population. Existence of a reservoir is confirmed when infection within the target population cannot be sustained after all transmission between target and nontarget populations has been eliminated. When disease can be controlled solely by interventions within target populations, little knowledge of potentially complex reservoir infection dynamics is necessary for effective control. We discuss the practical value of different approaches that may be used to identify reservoirs in the field.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
The record
- Venue
- Emerging infectious diseases
- Topic
- Zoonotic diseases and public health
- Field
- Medicine
- Canadian institutions
- —
- Funders
- Department for International DevelopmentWellcome TrustUniversity of Guelph
- Keywords
- PopulationBiologyDiseaseTransmission (telecommunications)Infectious disease (medical specialty)Computational biologyRisk analysis (engineering)Computer scienceMedicineEnvironmental healthPathology
- Has abstract in OpenAlex
- yes