Transoceanic pathogen transfer in the age of sail and steam
Elizabeth N. Blackmore,
James O. Lloyd-Smith
Abstract:In the centuries following Christopher Columbus’s 1492 voyage to the Americas, transoceanic travel opened unprecedented pathways in global pathogen circulation. Yet no biological transfer is a single, discrete event. We use mathematical modeling to quantify historical risk of shipborne pathogen introduction, exploring the respective contributions of journey time, ship size, population susceptibility, transmission intensity, density dependence, and pathogen biology. We contextualize our results using port arriv… Show more
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