A multi-scale epidemic model of Salmonella infection with heterogeneous shedding∗

Abstract

Salmonella strains colonize the digestive tract of farm livestock, such as chickens or pigs, without affecting them, and potentially infect food products, representing a threat for human health ranging from food poisoning to typhoid fever. It has been shown that the ability to excrete the pathogen in the environment and contaminate other animals is variable. This heterogeneity in pathogen carriage and shedding results from interactions between the host’s immune response, the pathogen and the commensal intestinal microbiota. In this paper we propose a novel generic multiscale modeling framework of heterogeneous pathogen transmission in an animal population. At the intra-host level, the model describes the interaction between the commensal microbiota, the pathogen and the inflammatory response. Random fluctuations in the ecological dynamics of the individual microbiota and transmission at between-host scale are added to obtain a drift-diffusion PDE model of the pathogen distribution at the population level. The model is further extended to represent transmission between several populations. The asymptotic behavior as well as the impact of control strategies including cleaning and antimicrobial administration are investigated through numerical simulation.