The effect of ongoing exposure dynamics in dose response relationships.

ABSTRACT: Characterizing infectivity as a function of pathogen dose is integral to microbial risk assessment. Dose-response experiments usually administer doses to subjects at one time. Phenomenological models of the resulting data, such as the exponential and the Beta-Poisson models, ignore dose timing and assume independent risks from each pathogen. Real world exposure to pathogens, however, is a sequence of discrete events where concurrent or prior pathogen arrival affects the capacity of immune effectors to engage and kill newly arriving pathogens. We model immune effector and pathogen interactions during the period before infection becomes established in order to capture the dynamics generating dose timing effects. Model analysis reveals an inverse relationship between the time over which expos

SUBMITTER: Pujol JM 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC2685010 | biostudies-literature | 2009 Jun

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature