Leveraging pathogen community distributions to understand outbreak and emergence potential

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. Together, our results make a compelling case for incorporating a community ecological perspective into existing disease forecasting efforts.