Abstract
Understanding pathogen outbreak and emergence events has important implications to the management of infectious disease. Apart from preempting infectious disease events, there is considerable interest in determining why certain pathogens are consistently found in some regions, and why others spontaneously emerge or reemerge over time. Here, we use a trait-free approach which leverages information on the global community of human infectious diseases to estimate the potential for pathogen outbreak, emergence, and re-emergence events over time. Our approach uses pairwise dissimilarities among pathogen distributions between countries and country-level pathogen composition to quantify pathogen outbreak, emergence, and re-emergence potential as a function of time (e.g., number of years between training and prediction), pathogen type (e.g., virus), and transmission mode (e.g., vector-borne). We find that while outbreak and re-emergence potential are well captured by our simple model, prediction of emergence events remains elusive, and sudden global emergences like an influenza pandemic seem beyond the predictive capacity of the model. While our approach allows for dynamic predictability of outbreak and re-emergence events, data deficiencies and the stochastic nature of emergence events may preclude accurate prediction; but our results make a compelling case for incorporating a community ecology perspective into existing disease forecasting efforts.
Author contributions: TD, CJC, and TP conceived of the idea for the study. TD and TP designed the model. All authors contributed to the writing of the manuscript.
Footnotes
Data accessibility: R code is available on figshare at https://doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.6364955.
Ethics: This study used existing data on pathogen outbreak and emergence events in human populations.
Funding: This work was supported by the National Socio-Environmental Synthesis Center (SESYNC) under funding received from the National Science Foundation DBI-1639145.
Competing interests: The authors declare no competing interests.