The "ultimate cure" claim, of course, is predicated on our capacity to ignore the dynamic interplay between the vector, host, and pathogen that occurs within a social, cultural, physical and biological context.
These differentiations are intimately linked to interactions with mammalian hosts or insect vectors, and often, these differentiations appear central to the successful transfer of the parasite between vector and host, and host and vector.
14 These parameters include the numerical ratio of vectors to hosts, the rate of contact between vectors and hosts, and the probability of infection transmission with each contact.
Consider a vector-borne disease which can only be transmitted between vectors and hosts, and can thus be modeled on a bipartite network.
While much has been made of the physiologic stability of the intracellular environment, vector transmission requires extraordinary flexibility to bind and infect the variety of cell types encountered in the travels of the pathogen within and between vector and host(s).
Here we construct an epidemiological model for virus transmission between vectors and hosts on a network of host populations distributed among city and town patches, and investigate disease control through vaccination and vector control using variants of the sterile insect technique (SIT).
Vector borne diseases represent a rich and dynamic interplay between the vector, the host, and the pathogen; but it is an interaction that occurs within a social and cultural context as much as it is one that occurs within a physical and biological context.
It is through inter-disciplinary (and to a lesser extent multi-disciplinary) research that the dynamic interplay between the vector, the host, and the pathogen within a social, cultural, physical and biological context can be understood.
She teamed up with Boots to use mathematical models of evolutionary competition between vectors and hosts – the malaria parasite and the mosquito, for example – to test whether the strategy would work.
This led to a coevolutionary arms race between vectors and hosts in the feeding site.
