Testing predictability of disease outbreaks with a simple model of pathogen biogeography.

ABSTRACT: Predicting disease emergence and outbreak events is a critical task for public health professionals and epidemiologists. Advances in global disease surveillance are increasingly generating datasets that are worth more than their component parts for prediction-oriented work. Here, we use a trait-free approach which leverages information on the global community of human infectious diseases to predict the biogeography of pathogens through time. Our approach takes pairwise dissimilarities between countries' pathogen communities and pathogens' geographical distributions and uses these to predict country-pathogen associations. We compare the success rates of our model for predicting pathogen outbreak, emergence and re-emergence potential as a function of time (e.g. number of years between traini

SUBMITTER: Dallas TA 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC6894608 | biostudies-literature | 2019 Nov

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature