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Comment
. 2022 Oct 8;400(10359):1191-1193.
doi: 10.1016/S0140-6736(22)01789-5. Epub 2022 Sep 21.

Evolutionary consequences of delaying intervention for monkeypox

Philip L F Johnson  1 , Carl T Bergstrom  2 , Roland R Regoes  3 , Ira M Longini  4 , M Elizabeth Halloran  5 , Rustom Antia  6
Affiliations
Comment

Evolutionary consequences of delaying intervention for monkeypox

Philip L F Johnson et al. Lancet. .
No abstract available

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Conflict of interest statement

CTB received consulting fees from Color Health and honoraria from Novartis Oncology. All other authors declare no competing interests. This Correspondence was supported in part by the Swiss National Science Foundation (grant number 31003A_179170 to RRR) and the US National Institutes of Health (grant numbers U01 AI 150747 and U01 AI 144616 to RA).

Figures

Figure
Figure
R0 affects a pathogen's evolutionary potential (A) When waiting until an epidemic affects N=16 people simultaneously, R0=1.5 has longer chains of transmission affecting more individuals in total than R0=4. (B) These patterns hold in general when waiting until N simultaneous infections, with lower R0 being worse. (C) Evolution depends on mutations, which depend on the transmission chain length and total number of infected individuals, so, when waiting for a given N before intervening, lower R0 has greater probability of evolving. R0=basic reproductive number in humans before evolution.
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Comment on

  • Nextstrain: real-time tracking of pathogen evolution.
    Hadfield J, Megill C, Bell SM, Huddleston J, Potter B, Callender C, Sagulenko P, Bedford T, Neher RA. Hadfield J, et al. Bioinformatics. 2018 Dec 1;34(23):4121-4123. doi: 10.1093/bioinformatics/bty407. Bioinformatics. 2018. PMID: 29790939 Free PMC article.

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