Fine-scale Identification of the Most Likely Source of a Human Plague Infection

Abstract

We describe an analytic approach to provide fine-scale discrimination among multiple infection source hypotheses. This approach uses mutation-rate data for rapidly evolving multiple locus variable-number tandem repeat loci in probabilistic models to identify the most likely source. We illustrate the utility of this approach using data from a North American human plague investigation.

Keywords

• Molecular epidemiology
• plague
• Yersinia pestis
• VNTR
• MLVA
• probabilistic modeling