Plague Research Today is a free monthly online journal that collates and summarizes the latest research about Plague, including details on bubonic plague, yersinia pestis, infection, types, treatment.

Statistical analysis of the dynamics of antibody loss to a disease-causing agent: plague in natural populations of great gerbils as an example.

Park S, Chan KS, Viljugrein H, Nekrassova L, Suleimenov B, Ageyev VS, Klassovskiy NL, Pole SB, Chr Stenseth N

Department of Statistics, Seoul National University, Sillim-dong, Gwanak-gu, Seoul 151-742, South Korea.

We propose a new stochastic framework for analysing the dynamics of the immunity response of wildlife hosts against a disease-causing agent. Our study is motivated by the need to analyse the monitoring time-series data covering the period from 1975 to 1995 on bacteriological and serological tests-samples from great gerbils being the main host of Yersinia pestis in Kazakhstan. Based on a four-state continuous-time Markov chain, we derive a generalized nonlinear mixed-effect model for analysing the serological test data. The immune response of a host involves the production of antibodies in response to an antigen. Our analysis shows that great gerbils recovered from a plague infection are more likely to keep their antibodies to plague and survive throughout the summer-to-winter season than throughout the winter-to-summer season. Provided the seasonal mortality rates are similar (which seems to be the case based on a mortality analysis with abundance data), our finding indicates that the immune function of the sampled great gerbils is seasonal.

Published 26 January 2007 in J R Soc Interface, 4(12): 57-64.
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