What is it about?
Individuals differ in how easily they become infected and spread parasites. Using beetles and a gut parasite, we tested how these differences affect disease outbreaks. Population averages largely determined parasite spread, but greater individual differences made outbreaks more unpredictable, even under the same starting conditions, with implications for managing epidemics.
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Why is it important?
Most studies of the effect of variation on disease spread rely on theory or short-term data and rarely test how individual differences affect outbreaks over time. Our work provides a rare experimental assessment of parasite spread across multiple generations, extended further with agent-based modelling. This helps explain why similar may experience very different epidemics and highlights a key challenge for forecasting and managing real-world disease outbreaks.
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This page is a summary of: Host heterogeneity and unpredictability in parasite outbreaks, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, January 2026, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences,
DOI: 10.1073/pnas.2522557123.
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