Print PageThe increasing importance of pathogens that are transmitted between multiple hosts has highlighted the need to identify the roles that different hosts play in pathogen amplification or dampening. This requires integrating information on host infectiousness, contact rates, and factors governing the infectious lifespan. These traits are often logistically difficult to measure for a single pathogen of a single host. Nonetheless, for several pathogens that threaten human health, significant effort has been invested to estimate these parameters for a range of hosts. These initial efforts enable us to assess whether we can predict, based on more easily measured host traits, their importance in transmission.
Results/Conclusions
We found that some factors that govern the role of species in transmission were correlated with traits of organisms, but predicting the overall role of a species in transmission from easily measured traits was, with currently available data, challenging. However, given the limited quantity of data currently available to examine links between traits and contribution to pathogen amplification, we argue that additional efforts in this area may be fruitful.
