Complexity DTC Mini-project Proposal:
Multi-host modelling of influenza A
Offered by: Michael Tildesley and Thomas House
Complexity Science Centre and Warwick Mathematics Institute
Background
Influenza has been described as the
‘last great plague’ of mankind. Part of
the reason that ’flu (in particular
influenza A) inhabits many hosts [1,
fig. right] and has many strains
(labeled by H and N number).
The biology and epidemiology of
influenza is radically different
depending on the host species: while
ducks are essentially asymptomatic
carriers of all influenza strains – the
‘Trojan horse’ of disease spread – in
other birds and mammals, influenza
can be lethal. The mortality rate of H5N1 is in excess of 90% in chickens, and over 30% in
humans, and while the recent H1N1 ‘swine flu’ pandemic was relatively mild in most clinical
cases, it remains of critical importance to understand how likely it is that more lethal strains
will cause a pandemic in the human population.
Project
A complex set of ordinary differential equations (ODEs) will be written down to describe the
complex interaction of multi-host escape models [2] with multi-strain dynamics [3]. These will
require analytic work to derive, and the method for analysis will be numerical integration in
e.g. FORTRAN or MATLAB. The results will be compared to qualitative and quantitative data
on species abundance and strain emergence.
Outcomes
The aim of the project is to model the complex strain diversity and between-species
epidemiology of influenza A. Progress will be possible on this within three months, but the
broad research question is a large one and lends itself to extension in many different
directions, from the use of mathematical techniques to improve tractability, to improving
model realism through the inclusion of space, stochasticity and by statistical fitting to data.
References
[1] Roy Jennings and Robert C Read, Influenza: Human and Avian, Royal Society of
Medicine Press 2nd ed. (2006).
[2] N. Arinaminpathy and A. R. McLean, Evolution and emergence of novel human infections,
Proc. R. Soc. B (2009) 276, 3937–3943
[3] Julia R. Gog and Bryan T. Grenfell, Dynamics and selection of many-strain pathogens,
PNAS (2002) 99, 26:17209–17214.