1. Identifying requirements for the invasion of a tick species and tick-borne pathogen through TICKSIM
- Author
-
Holly Gaff and Robyn M. Nadolny
- Subjects
Population ,Population Dynamics ,Zoology ,Tick ,Models, Biological ,Host-Parasite Interactions ,Ticks ,Tick borne ,parasitic diseases ,medicine ,Animals ,Humans ,education ,Pathogen ,Tick-borne disease ,education.field_of_study ,biology ,Transmission (medicine) ,Applied Mathematics ,Systems Biology ,Ehrlichiosis ,General Medicine ,Mathematical Concepts ,bacterial infections and mycoses ,biology.organism_classification ,medicine.disease ,Computational Mathematics ,Ehrlichia chaffeensis ,Tick-Borne Diseases ,Modeling and Simulation ,Vector (epidemiology) ,Arachnid Vectors ,General Agricultural and Biological Sciences ,Ixodidae - Abstract
Ticks and tick-borne diseases have been on the move throughout the United State over the past twenty years. We use an agent-based model, TICKSIM, to identify the key parameters that determine the success of invasion of the tick and if that is successful, the succees of the tick-borne pathogen. We find that if an area has competent hosts, an initial population of ten ticks is predicted to always establish a new population. The establishment of the tick-borne pathogen depends on three parameters: the initial prevalence in the ten founding ticks, the probability that a tick infects the longer-lived hosts and the probability that a tick infects the shorter-lived hosts. These results indicate that the transmission rates to hosts in the newly established area can be used to predict the potential risk of disease to humans.
- Published
- 2013