Publications tagged "rabies virus"

The epidemiological dynamics of virus transmission among bats remains poorly understood, even for relatively well-studied viruses like rabies. Using longitudinal serology assays of Peruvian vampire bats, we show that rabies maintenance appears to require transmission among multiple, nearby bat colonies which may be facilitated by waning of protective immunity. More

Why most cross-species transmissions fail to establish ongoing transmission in the newly infected species remains poorly understood. Examining cross-species inoculations involving rabies, we show that mismatches in virulence which are predictable from host and viral factors make sustained transmission in the novel host less likely. These mechanistic insights help to explain and predict host shift events and highlight meta-analyses of existing experimental inoculation data as a powerful and generalisable approach for understanding the dynamics of index infections in novel species. More

Rabies virus persists in species-specific cycles that rarely sustain transmission in alternative species. The determinants of these species-associations and the adaptive significance of genetic divergence between host-associated virus lineages are poorly understood. This review assesses various lines of evidence and proposes a synthetic hypothesis for the respective roles of ecology and evolution in rabies virus host shifts. More

We describe a statistical framework for reconstructing the sequence of transmission events between observed cases of an endemic infectious disease using genetic, temporal and spatial information. When applied to partial genome sequences of rabies virus sampled from an endemic region of South Africa, our method reveals several distinct transmission cycles with little contact between them, and direct transmission over long distances suggesting significant anthropogenic influence in the movement of infected dogs. More

In the resource-poor settings where dog rabies remains endemic, the demonstration of a need to divert scarce funds towards exhaustive … More