PT  - JOURNAL ARTICLE
AU  - Miles D. Miller-Dickson
AU  - Victor A. Meszaros
AU  - Francis Baffour-Awuah Junior
AU  - Salvador Almagro-Moreno
AU  - C. Brandon Ogbunugafor
TI  - Waterborne, abiotic and other indirectly transmitted (W.A.I.T.) infections are defined by the dynamics of free-living pathogens and environmental reservoirs
AID  - 10.1101/525089
DP  - 2019 Jan 01
TA  - bioRxiv
PG  - 525089
4099  - http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2019/05/02/525089.short
4100  - http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2019/05/02/525089.full
AB  - —While the ecology of infectious disease is a rich field with decades worth of empirical evidence and theory, there are aspects that remain relatively under-examined. One example is the importance of the free-living survival stage of certain pathogens, and especially is cases where they are transmitted indirectly between hosts through an environmental reservoir intermediate. In this study, we develop an integrated, broadly applicable mathematical method to examine diseases fitting this description—the waterborne, abiotic and other indirectly transmitted (W.A.I.T.) infection framework. To demonstrate its utility, we construct realistic models of two very different epidemic scenarios: cholera in a densely populated setting with limited access to clean drinking water and hepatitis C virus in an urban setting of injection-drug users. Using these two exemplars, we find that the W.A.I.T. model fortifies the centrality of reservoir dynamics in the “sit and wait” infection strategy, and provides a way to simulate a diverse set of intervention strategies.