Why, when and how should exposure be considered in a model representing the within-host immune response to infection?

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Touzeau, Suzanne | Go, Natacha | Bidot, Caroline | Belloc, Catherine

Edité par CCSD -

International audience. Understanding the impact of exposure on the within-host dynamics and its outcome in terms of infectiousness is a key issue to better understand and control the infection spread. It has not been fully explored yet, neither in experimental infections, nor in modelling studies. We tackled this issue by a modelling approach focused on the Porcine Reproductive and Respiratory Syndrome virus (PRRSv), a major concern for the swine industry. We developed a deterministic model representing PRRSv immune and infection dynamics in the lung; we built designs of numerical experiments to explore the impact of exposure and strain virulence on characteristics of the viral and immune dynamics; we then quantified their impact by global sensitivity analyses and descriptive statistics. Our results show that exposure intensity has a major impact on infection severity. Besides, representing exposure due to contacts by short or even punctual exposures would tend to underestimate the infection duration. As infection severity and duration both contribute to pig infectiousness, implementing a prolonged exposure of the adequate intensity would be recommended in an immuno-epidemiological context.

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