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Science 30 April 2004:
Vol. 304. no. 5671, pp. 736 - 738
DOI: 10.1126/science.1095854
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Reports

Predictive Thresholds for Plague in Kazakhstan

Stephen Davis,1,2 Mike Begon,3 Luc De Bruyn,2,4 Vladimir S. Ageyev,5 Nikolay L. Klassovskiy,5 Sergey B. Pole,5 Hildegunn Viljugrein,6 Nils Chr. Stenseth,6 Herwig Leirs2,1*

In Kazakhstan and elsewhere in central Asia, the bacterium Yersinia pestis circulates in natural populations of gerbils, which are the source of human cases of bubonic plague. Our analysis of field data collected between 1955 and 1996 shows that plague invades, fades out, and reinvades in response to fluctuations in the abundance of its main reservoir host, the great gerbil (Rhombomys opimus). This is a rare empirical example of the two types of abundance thresholds for infectious disease—invasion and persistence— operating in a single wildlife population. We parameterized predictive models that should reduce the costs of plague surveillance in central Asia and thereby encourage its continuance.

1 Danish Pest Infestation Laboratory, Skovbrynet 14, DK-2800 Kongens Lyngby, Denmark.
2 Department of Biology, University of Antwerp, Groenenborgerlaan 171, B-2020 Antwerp, Belgium.
3 Centre for Comparative Infectious Diseases and Population and Evolutionary Biology Research Group, School of Biological Sciences, The University of Liverpool, Liverpool, L69 3BX, UK.
4 Institute of Nature Conservation, Kliniekstraat 25, 1070 Brussels, Belgium.
5 M. Aikimbaev's Kazakh Scientific Center for Quarantine and Zoonotic Diseases, 14 Kapalskaya Street, Almaty 480074, Republic of Kazakhstan.
6 Centre for Ecological and Evolutionary Synthesis (CEES), Department of Biology, University of Oslo, Post Office Box 1050 Blindern, N-0316 Oslo, Norway.

* To whom correspondence should be addressed. E-mail: herwig.leirs{at}ua.ac.be

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