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Science 30 October 2009:
Vol. 326. no. 5953, pp. 726 - 728
DOI: 10.1126/science.1175980
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Reports

Quantifying the Impact of Immune Escape on Transmission Dynamics of Influenza

Andrew W. Park,1,2,* Janet M. Daly,3,4 Nicola S. Lewis,3,5,6 Derek J. Smith,5,7,8 James L. N. Wood,6 Bryan T. Grenfell7,9,10

Influenza virus evades prevailing natural and vaccine-induced immunity by accumulating antigenic change in the haemagglutinin surface protein. Linking amino acid substitutions in haemagglutinin epitopes to epidemiology has been problematic because of the scarcity of data connecting these scales. We use experiments on equine influenza virus to address this issue, quantifying how key parameters of viral establishment and shedding increase the probability of transmission with genetic distance between previously immunizing virus and challenge virus. Qualitatively similar patterns emerge from analyses based on antigenic distance and from a published human influenza study. Combination of the equine data and epidemiological models allows us to calculate the effective reproductive number of transmission as a function of relevant genetic change in the virus, illuminating the probability of influenza epidemics as a function of immunity.

1 Odum School of Ecology, University of Georgia, Athens, GA 30602, USA.
2 Department of Infectious Diseases, College of Veterinary Medicine, University of Georgia, Athens, GA 30602, USA.
3 Animal Health Trust, Lanwades Park, Newmarket, Suffolk CB8 7UU, UK.
4 School of Veterinary Medicine and Science, The University of Nottingham, Sutton Bonington, Leicestershire LE12 5RD, UK.
5 Department of Zoology, University of Cambridge CB2 3EJ, UK.
6 Cambridge Infectious Diseases Consortium, Department of Veterinary Medicine, Cambridge CB3 0ES, UK.
7 Fogarty International Center, National Institutes of Health, Bethesda, MD 20892, USA.
8 Department of Virology, Erasmus Medical Center, Rotterdam, Netherlands.
9 Center for Infectious Disease Dynamics, The Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA 16802, USA.
10 Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology and Woodrow Wilson School, Princeton University, Princeton, NJ 08540, USA.

* To whom correspondence should be addressed. Email: awpark{at}uga.edu

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Science. ISSN 0036-8075 (print), 1095-9203 (online)