Understanding the drivers and consequences of disease epidemics is an important frontier in ecology. However, long-term data on hosts, their parasites, and the corresponding environmental conditions necessary to explore these interactions are often unavailable. We examined the dynamics of Daphnia pulicaria, a keystone zooplankter in lake ecosystems, to explore the long-term causes and consequen...

BACKGROUND Parasites are essential components of natural communities, but the factors that generate skewed distributions of parasite occurrences and abundances across host populations are not well understood. METHODS Here, we analyse at a seascape scale the spatiotemporal relationships of parasite exposure and host body-size with the proportion of infected hosts (i.e., prevalence) and aggrega...

BACKGROUND The transmission of hemorrhagic fever with renal syndrome (HFRS) is influenced by population dynamics of its main host, rodents. It is therefore important to better understand rodents' characteristic in epidemic areas. METHODOLOGY/PRINCIPAL FINDINGS We examined the potential impact of food available and climatic variability on HFRS rodent host and developed forecasting models. Mont...

BACKGROUND Identifying hosts of blood-feeding insect vectors is crucial in understanding their role in disease transmission. Rhodesian human African trypanosomiasis (rHAT), also known as acute sleeping sickness is caused by Trypanosoma brucei rhodesiense and transmitted by tsetse flies. The disease is commonly associated with wilderness areas of east and southern Africa. Such areas hold a diver...

Hepatitis C virus (HCV) RNA circulates in the blood of persistently infected patients in lipoviroparticles (LVPs), which are heterogeneous in density and associated with host lipoproteins and antibodies. The variability and lability of these virus-host complexes on fractionation has hindered our understanding of the structure of LVP and determination of the physicochemical properties of the HCV...

toxoplasma encepfiautis (te) is rare in pediatric patients, but it is an emerging opportunistic infection in the increasing number of immunocompromised hosts. it should be considered in patients who present with fever and evolving cns symptoms. the outcome of these patients is always poor because of delay in diagnosis. we report one case of toxoplasma encephalitis in a child without hiv infecti...

If the transmission occurs through local contact of the individuals in a spatially structured population, the evolutionarily stable (ESS) traits of parasite might be quite different from what the classical theory with complete mixing predicts. In this paper, we theoretically study the ESS virulence and transmission rate of a parasite in a lattice-structured host population, in which the host ca...