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Berlin Epidemiological Methods Colloquium (BEMC): June meeting

This month we have invited Matthieu Domenech de Cellès from the Max Planck Institute for Infection Biology in Berlin to give a talk titled "Modeling the Epidemiological Interactions Between Respiratory Viruses and Their Implications for Disease Control"

Interaction—that is, the ability of one pathogen to alter the risk of infection or disease caused by another pathogen—is an intriguing aspect of the biology of many respiratory viruses, including influenza viruses, respiratory syncytial viruses (RSV), and SARS-CoV-2. Despite growing experimental evidence for such interactions, however, their epidemiological consequences remain poorly defined. In this talk, I will present several of my lab’s research projects that aim at elucidating the interactions between respiratory viruses using mathematical models of transmission. I will first describe a general framework to systematically capture the components of pathogen interactions, showing how these models can encapsulate the framework in a mechanistic and parsimonious way. Next, building on the results of a recent study (Domenech de Cellès et al., Proceedings B 2022), I will illustrate how these models can be used to assess the design of epidemiological studies that aim to infer interaction. Specifically, I will show that test-negative designs—or other study designs based on co-detection prevalence data—are expected to frequently fail at estimating the strength, and even the direction, of interaction. Finally, I will present results of an ongoing modeling study of the interactions between influenza viruses and RSV, and explain how such interactions could be leveraged to induce indirect effects of influenza vaccination.

Jun 1, 2022 04:00 PM in Amsterdam, Berlin, Rome, Stockholm, Vienna