Speaker

Dr. Matthew Silk (Centre d’Ecologie Fonctionnelle et Evolutive (CEFE), Montpellier, France)

Abstract

Identifying why infectious diseases persist in some populations is a central challenge in disease ecology. For example, in wildlife hosts quantifying persistence can help identify maintenance hosts for targeted surveillance or management. Because social interactions underly transmission opportunities for many pathogens and parasites, they likely play a key role in determining if and how infectious diseases persist in particular host populations. Despite this, the role of social behaviour in disease maintenance has received much less attention than other host characteristics such as life-histories and phylogenetics. Here I will provide a theoretical overview of how social network structure and dynamics can contribute to disease maintenance. I will then illustrate some of these concepts using a European badger population naturally infected with Mycobacterium bovis (the causative agent of bovine tuberculosis) as an empirical case study. Overall, I hope to highlight the importance of integrating social behaviour into models of long-term host-pathogen coexistence. 

https://mattjsilk.weebly.com/