Abstract
We study how the interplay between the memory immune response and pathogen
mutation affects epidemic dynamics in two related models. The first explicitly
models pathogen mutation and individual memory immune responses, with contacted
individuals becoming infected only if they are exposed to strains that are
significantly different from other strains in their memory repertoire. The
second model is a reduction of the first to a system of difference equations.
In this case, individuals spend a fixed amount of time in a generalized immune
class. In both models, we observe four fundamentally different types of
behavior, depending on parameters: (1) pathogen extinction due to lack of
contact between individuals, (2) endemic infection (3) periodic epidemic
outbreaks, and (4) one or more outbreaks followed by extinction of the epidemic
due to extremely low minima in the oscillations. We analyze both models to
determine the location of each transition. Our main result is that pathogens in
highly connected populations must mutate rapidly in order to remain viable.
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