Department of Medical Microbiology, Radboud University Medical Center, Nijmegen, Netherlands; QIMR Berghofer Medical Research Institute, Brisbane, Australia
Mahidol-Oxford Tropical Medicine Research Unit, Faculty of Tropical Medicine, Mahidol University, Bangkok, Thailand; Centre for Tropical Medicine and Global Health, Nuffield Department of Medicine, University of Oxford, Oxford, United Kingdom
Mahidol-Oxford Tropical Medicine Research Unit, Faculty of Tropical Medicine, Mahidol University, Bangkok, Thailand; Centre for Tropical Medicine and Global Health, Nuffield Department of Medicine, University of Oxford, Oxford, United Kingdom
School of Mathematics and Statistics, University of Melbourne, Melbourne, Australia; Centre for Epidemiology and Biostatistics, Melbourne School of Population and Global Health, University of Melbourne, Melbourne, Australia; Epidemiology, Peter Doherty Institute for Infection and Immunity, Parkville, Australia
Renewed efforts to eliminate malaria have highlighted the potential to interrupt human-to-mosquito transmission — a process mediated by gametocyte kinetics in human hosts. Here we study the in vivo dynamics of Plasmodium falciparum gametocytes by establishing a framework which incorporates improved measurements of parasitemia, a novel gametocyte dynamics model and model fitting using Bayesian hierarchical inference. We found that the model provides an excellent fit to the clinical data from 17 volunteers infected with P. falciparum (3D7 strain) and reliably predicts observed gametocytemia. We estimated the sexual commitment rate and gametocyte sequestration time to be 0.54% (95% credible interval: 0.30–1.00%) per asexual replication cycle and 8.39 (6.54–10.59) days respectively. We used the data-calibrated model to investigate human-to-mosquito transmissibility, providing a method to link within-human host infection kinetics to epidemiological-scale infection and transmission patterns.
