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. 2007 Nov 7;2(11):e1130.
doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0001130.

The allometry of host-pathogen interactions

Jessica M Cable  1 , Brian J Enquist, Melanie E Moses
Affiliations

The allometry of host-pathogen interactions

Jessica M Cable et al. PLoS One. .

Abstract

Background: Understanding the mechanisms that control rates of disease progression in humans and other species is an important area of research relevant to epidemiology and to translating studies in small laboratory animals to humans. Body size and metabolic rate influence a great number of biological rates and times. We hypothesize that body size and metabolic rate affect rates of pathogenesis, specifically the times between infection and first symptoms or death.

Methods and principal findings: We conducted a literature search to find estimates of the time from infection to first symptoms (t(S)) and to death (t(D)) for five pathogens infecting a variety of bird and mammal hosts. A broad sampling of diseases (1 bacterial, 1 prion, 3 viruses) indicates that pathogenesis is controlled by the scaling of host metabolism. We find that the time for symptoms to appear is a constant fraction of time to death in all but one disease. Our findings also predict that many population-level attributes of disease dynamics are likely to be expressed as dimensionless quantities that are independent of host body size.

Conclusions and significance: Our results show that much variability in host pathogenesis can be described by simple power functions consistent with the scaling of host metabolic rate. Assessing how disease progression is controlled by geometric relationships will be important for future research. To our knowledge this is the first study to report the allometric scaling of host/pathogen interactions.

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Conflict of interest statement

Competing Interests: The authors have declared that no competing interests exist.

Figures

Figure 1
Figure 1. Time (days) from inoculation to (a) death and (b) 1st symptom versus mammalian body mass for Pseudorabies virus (PRV), Anthrax, Rabies, West Nile Virus (WNV), and Transmissible Spongiform Encephalopathy (TSE).
Figure 2
Figure 2. Time (days) from inoculation to death (tD) versus time from inoculation to 1st symptom (tS) for Pseudorabies Virus (PRV), Anthrax, and Rabies for a large range of mammalian body sizes, plotted with the 1∶1 line.
Figure 3
Figure 3. The frequency of values for Pseudorabies Virus, Rabies, and Anthrax across a large range of mammalian body sizes.
See this image and copyright information in PMC

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