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Antibiotic Treatment, Duration of Infectiousness, and Disease Transmission

Author(s): Thomas Caraco

By curing infectious individuals, antibiotic therapy must sometimes limit the spread of contagious disease among hosts. But suppose that a diseased host stops transmitting infection due either to antibiotic cure or to non-therapeutic removal (e.g., isolation or mortality). An antibiotic`s suppression of within-host pathogen growth increases the likelihood of curing a single infection and may also reduce the probability of non-therapeutic removal. If antibiotic treatment relaxes the total rate of infection removal sufficiently to extend the average duration of infectiousness, between-host transmission can increase. That is, under some conditions, curing individuals with antibiotics can impact public health negatively (more new infections). To explore this counter-intuitive, but plausible effect, this paper assumes that a deterministic within-host dynamics drives the infectious host's time-dependent probability of pathogen transmission, as well as the probabilistic duration of the infectious period. At the within-host scale, the model varies (1) inoculum size, (2) bacterial self-regulation, (3) the time between infection and initiation of therapy, and (4) antibiotic efficacy. At the between-host scale the model varies (5) the size of groups randomly encountered in the infectious host’s environment. Results identify conditions where an antibiotic can increase duration of a host`s infectiousness, and consequently increase the expected number of new infections. At lower antibiotic efficacy, therapy might convert a rare, serious bacterial disease into a common, but treatable infection.

Journal Statistics

Impact Factor: * 3.6

CiteScore: 2.9

Acceptance Rate: 11.01%

Time to first decision: 10.4 days

Time from article received to acceptance: 2-3 weeks

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