Abstract ↗AI summary
The abstract is read at the publisher; the summary is JClub's.
Individual host competence varies widely within and overlaps among species, and in West Nile virus the most infectious 20% of mourning doves supply about half of transmission.
- Why it matters: Species-level competence can miss how individual differences shape transmission, especially near thresholds where susceptibility and infectiousness interact with contact and abundance.
- What they did: The authors derived an individual competence index from infection biology, separating infectiousness and susceptibility from environmental contact and abundance, then linked it to reproduction numbers across four simulated systems.
- The result: In Lyme disease, nearly all high-competence individuals replaced themselves across plausible tick survival, while low-competence replacement depended on tick survival; in West Nile virus, species averages may understate contributions from highly infectious individuals.
The findingWhy it mattersWhat they didThe result
AI summary of the abstract · may contain errors · not medical advice · read the paper.
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