Authors

Discussion

As we are only too aware, many parasites that cause infectious diseases of human, livestock or conservation importance, circulate within diverse ecological communities comprising many potential host species and many other parasite species. Interactions across these communities can severely hamper our ability to manage the impacts these parasites have.  Interactions between co-circulating parasites can alter host susceptibility to, and impact of, the various parasite species involved. And variable abundances and susceptibilities among different host species can alter parasite transmission, maintenance and spread across the community.  Given these multiple interacting processes it is easy to become overwhelmed by the apparent complexity of these systems, making it very hard to understand the key processes driving parasite emergence, spread and impact.

Perhaps though there are ‘covert simplicities’ in many systems which, if we can identify them, can help us see past the apparent complexity, and focus on the key aspects that dominate parasite transmission dynamics. I will describe our attempts to identify these key aspects through the combination of conceptual and theoretical frameworks, and large-scale field experiments, to help tackle the apparent complexity of natural multihost – multiparasite systems.