Conveners
Phylodynamics & Phylogeography
- Áine O'Toole (University of Edinburgh)
- Tetyana Vasylyeva (UC San Diego)
The mpox epidemic in 2022 resulted in more than 100,000 cases across 122 countries. Low levels of case detection continued in 2023, during which New York City (NYC) experienced the largest number of infections per capita among all jurisdictions in the USA. By September 2023, an average of only 2.8 cases were detected per week. In January 2024, the rate increased 4.7-fold to 13.2 cases per...
Quantifying how fast pathogens spread across space is key to understanding epidemic dynamics and informing control strategies. Traditional approaches often rely on full phylogenetic reconstruction or spatially explicit models, which can be computationally demanding and sensitive to sampling biases between locations.
Here, we present a method to estimate the rate of geographical spread of...
West Nile Virus (WNV) is a mosquito-borne virus which primarily infects birds. Infections in humans (and horses) are unusual but serious, and can cause encephalitis and death. In Europe, WNV was first detected in Southern Portugal in the 1960s, with limited circulation in the most southern areas of the continent. Since the 1990s, circulation has increased, pushing further north, with human...
The emergence of SARS-CoV-2 has renewed interest in how coronaviruses evolve and transition to endemic circulation. The four seasonal human coronaviruses (hCoVs) 229E, NL63, OC43 and HKU1, differ in terms of their estimated times of emergence, receptor usage patterns and genome content. While they are frequently grouped clinically, these differences beg the question as to whether the evolution...
