Getting a free ride on poultry farms: how highly pathogenic avian influenza may persist in spite of its virulence

It is well-known that highly pathogenic avian influenza (HPAI) strains can arise from low pathogenic strains (LPAI) during epidemics in poultry farms. Despite this, the possibility that partial cross-immunity triggered by previous exposure to LPAI viruses may reduce the pathogenicity of HPAI and thus enhance its persistence has been generally overlooked in both empirical and theoretical work on avian influenza. We propose a simple mathematical model to investigate the interacting dynamics of HPAI and LPAI strains of avian influenza in small-scale poultry farms. Through the analysis of a deterministic ordinary differential equations model, we show that: (1) for a wide range of realistic model parameters, the reduction in pathogenicity yielded by previous LPAI infection might allow an HPAI strain that would not be able to persist in a host population when alone (ℜ₀ < 1) to invade and co-exist in the host population along with the LPAI strain and (2) the coexistence between the HPAI and LPAI strains may be characterized by multiyear periodicity. Because simulations showed that troughs between epidemics can be deep, with only a fraction of existing flocks infected by the HPAI strain, we also ran an individual-based stochastic version of the dynamical model to analyze the potential for natural fade-out of the HPAI strain. The analysis of the stochastic model confirms the prediction that previous exposure to a LPAI strain can significantly increase the duration of the epidemics by an HPAI strain before it fades from the population.