![]() ![]() This has led to the development of extensive theoretical literature on the epidemiology, ecology and evolution of host–pathogen interactions 6, 7, 8, 9. Infectious diseases remain a major problem for human health and agriculture 1, 2, 3, 4 and are increasingly recognized as important in ecosystems and conservation 5. More generally, our results show the importance of examining the evolutionary consequences of non-equilibrium dynamics. ![]() Furthermore, it follows that these pathogens will have a lower R 0, with clear implications for epidemic behaviour, endemic behaviour and control. There is considerable variation in the degree of antigenic escape that occurs across pathogens and our results may help to explain the difference in virulence between related pathogens including, potentially, human influenzas. Our analysis predicts both the timings and outcomes of antigenic shifts leading to repeated epidemics and predicts the increase in variation in both antigenicity and virulence before antigenic escape. We model the impact of antigenic drift and escape on the evolution of virulence in a generalized pathogen and apply a recently introduced oligomorphic methodology that captures the dynamics of the mean and variance of traits, to show analytically that these non-equilibrium dynamics select for the long-term persistence of more acute pathogens with higher virulence. In particular, pathogens often show antigenic escape from host immune defences, leading to repeated epidemics, fluctuating selection and diversification, but we do not understand how this impacts the evolution of virulence. Despite the propensity for complex and non-equilibrium dynamics in nature, eco-evolutionary analytical theory typically assumes that populations are at equilibria. ![]()
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