Date: Friday, February 08, 2013
Location: 1084 East Hall (3:00 PM to 4:00 PM)
Title: Unmasking the interaction between influenza and bacterial pneumonia
Abstract: Polymicrobial infections, whereby transmission and pathogenicity of one agent are affected by interactions with others, are increasingly recognized. An important putative manifestation of this phenomenon involves pneumococcus bacteria and their role during influenza pandemics and seasonal epidemics. While experiments in animal models have unequivocally demonstrated presence of influenza-pneumococcus interaction, epidemiological support for an association in humans remains unclear. In this talk, I will describe how using high-resolution case reports, a mechanistic transmission model, and a likelihood-based inference framework, we have characterized the nature, timing and magnitude of the interaction. We find support for a strong but short-lived interaction, with influenza infection increasing susceptibility to pneumococcal pneumonia ~100-fold. Given the nature and the timescale of the interaction, the ability to detect any association from epidemio- logical data may depend on the variability in the magnitude of influenza outbreaks. Further, I will explain the implications of these results by studying a within-host model of pathogenesis, characterized as coupled delay differential equations.
Speaker: Pej Rohani
Institution: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, University of Michigan
Event Organizer: Charlie Doering doering@umich.edu
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