V Ginot | PubMed Health

PubMed2006

The early drug selection of nematodes to anthelmintics: stochastic transmission and population in refuge.

We have developed an individual-based model to reflect the complexity of the early phase of drug resistance selection in a nematode/sheep model. The infection process consists of the stochastic ingestion of infective larvae spatially aggregated in clumps. Each clump corresponds to infective larvae, which are the offspring of the mature nematodes from a given sheep. We studied the dynamics of the parasitic population and the frequency of the recessive resistance alleles during selection by anthelmintic treatments. The interaction between genetic and demographic processes illustrated the trade-off between the control of the infection and the delay of resistance selection. We confirmed the importance of the number of treatments and their timing. The same treatment frequency may result in different outcomes on resistance selection in relation to the size of the refuge (infective larvae on pasture). Treatment applied during the summer (when the mortality of infective larvae on pasture was high), may lead to a rapid selection of drug resistance and a lack of control of sheep and pasture contamination. We showed that higher stocking rates were also a force in promoting the resistance allele selection.

Animals↗

PubMed2005

Modelling macroparasite aggregation using a nematode-sheep system: the Weibull distribution as an alternative to the negative binomial distribution?

Macroparasites are almost always aggregated across their host populations, hence the Negative Binomial Distribution (NBD) with its exponent parameter k is widely used for modelling, quantifying or analysing parasite distributions. However, many studies have pointed out some drawbacks in the use of the NBD, with respect to the sensitivity of k to the mean number of parasites per host or the under-representation of the heavily infected hosts in the estimate of k. In this study, we compare the fit of the NBD with 4 other widely used distributions on observed parasitic gastrointestinal nematode distributions in their sheep host populations (11 datasets). Distributions were fitted to observed data using maximum likelihood estimator and the best fits were selected using the Akaike's Information Criterion (AIC). A simulation study was also conducted in order to assess the possible bias in parameter estimations especially in the case of small sample sizes. We found that the NBD is seldom the best fit for gastrointestinal nematode distributions. The Weibull distribution was clearly more appropriate over a very wide range of degrees of aggregation, mainly because it was more flexible in fitting the heavily infected hosts. Moreover, the Weibull distribution estimates are less sensitive to sample size. Thus, when possible, we suggest to carefully check on observed data if the NBD is appropriate before conducting any further analysis on parasite distributions.

Animals↗