Multi-scale modeling of malaria parasite diversity
Abstract
Malaria, a parasitic disease spread by mosquitoes, imposes an enormous health and economic burden across the globe. The Ross-Macdonald mathematical framework for the transmission dynamics of malaria, developed in the early 20th century, has informed control policies for this disease and provided the basis for numerous population-level models for vector-borne disease of varying complexity. In the world of infectious disease modeling, there has been an increased interest in linking within-host pathogen dynamics to between-host transmission. I will introduce a multi-scale model of malaria that tracks parasite life cycle dynamics and parasite sequences within each mosquito and each human, as well as the transmission of these genetically diverse parasites between these two populations. The degree of parasite diversity has important implications for the transmissibility of a malaria infection and the severity of the disease for the infected human. We investigate how this diversity changes over time, and how it differs based on differences in environmental and epidemiological characteristics of the system.