Population structure across scales facilitates coexistence and spatial heterogeneity of antibiotic-resistant infections.

ABSTRACT: Antibiotic-resistant infections are a growing threat to human health, but basic features of the eco-evolutionary dynamics remain unexplained. Most prominently, there is no clear mechanism for the long-term coexistence of both drug-sensitive and resistant strains at intermediate levels, a ubiquitous pattern seen in surveillance data. Here we show that accounting for structured or spatially-heterogeneous host populations and variability in antibiotic consumption can lead to persistent coexistence over a wide range of treatment coverages, drug efficacies, costs of resistance, and mixing patterns. Moreover, this mechanism can explain other puzzling spatiotemporal features of drug-resistance epidemiology that have received less attention, such as large differences in the prevalence of resistanc

SUBMITTER: Krieger MS 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC7365476 | biostudies-literature | 2020 Jul

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature