Giovanni Lo Iacono

University of Surrey · School of Veterinary Medicine

Early detection of osteoarthritis remains the most effective method of managing osteoarthritis. This research aimed to measure locomotion patterns at walk, trot and sprint, and investigate their relation to ability to scratch and sleep behaviour in healthy and osteoarthritic (OA) lame dogs using an externally validated second-by-second dog activity...

Introduction Cystic echinococcosis (CE) is a zoonotic parasite caused by the cestode Echinococcus granulosus sensu lato (s.l.) which predominantly affects livestock. The disease is endemic in central-southern and insular Italy, with CE particularly infecting sheep, goats, cattle, and water buffalo. The spatial distribution of CE in endemic regions...

Background Human, animal, and environmental health are increasingly threatened by the emergence and spread of antibiotic resistance. Inappropriate use of antibiotic treatments commonly contributes to this threat, but it is also becoming apparent that multiple, interconnected environmental factors can play a significant role. Thus, a One Health appr...

The Natal multimammate mouse (Mastomys natalensis) is the reservoir host of Lassa virus (LASV), an arenavirus that causes Lassa haemorrhagic fever in humans in West Africa. While previous studies suggest that spillover risk is focal within rural villages due to the spatial behaviour of the rodents, the level of clustering was never specifically ass...

An amendment to this paper has been published and can be accessed via a link at the top of the paper.

Recent outbreaks of animal-borne emerging infectious diseases have likely been precipitated by a complex interplay of changing ecological, epidemiological and socio-economic factors. Here, we develop modelling methods that capture elements of each of these factors, to predict the risk of Ebola virus disease (EVD) across time and space. Our modellin...

Public health practitioners require measures to evaluate how vulnerable populations are to diseases, especially for zoonoses (i.e. diseases transmitted from animals to humans) given their pandemic potential. These measures would be valuable to support strategic and operational decision making and allocation of resources. Although vulnerability is w...

Background: Campylobacteriosis is a major public health concern. The weather factors that influence spatial and seasonal distributions are not fully understood. Methods: To investigate the impacts of temperature and rainfall on Campylobacter infections in England and Wales, cases of Campylobacter were linked to local temperature and rainfall at lab...

Background: Campylobacteriosis is a major public health concern. The weather factors that influence spatial and seasonal distributions are not fully understood. Methods: To investigate the impacts of temperature and rainfall on Campylobacter infections in England and Wales, cases of Campylobacter were linked to local temperature and rainfall at lab...

Background: Campylobacteriosis is a major public health concern. The weather factors that influence spatial and seasonal distributions are not fully understood. Methods: To investigate the impacts of temperature and rainfall on Campylobacter infections in England and Wales, cases of Campylobacter were linked to local temperature and rainfall at lab...

Involving and engaging the public are crucial for effective prioritisation, dissemination and implementation of research about the complex interactions between environments and health. Involvement is also important to funders and policy makers who often see it as vital for building trust and justifying the investment of public money. In public heal...

Hepatitis A is caused by hepatitis A virus and occurs worldwide. Estimating the transmissibility, which is usually characterized by the basic reproductive number R0, the mean number of secondary infectious cases generated by a single primary infectious case introduced into a totally susceptible population, provides crucial information for the effor...

Background: Many infectious diseases of public health importance display annual seasonal patterns in their incidence. We aimed to systematically document the seasonality of several human infectious disease pathogens in England and Wales, highlighting those organisms that appear weather-sensitive and therefore may be influenced by climate change in...

Vector-borne diseases (VBDs) of humans and domestic animals are a significant component of the global burden of disease and a key driver of poverty. The transmission cycles of VBDs are often strongly mediated by the ecological requirements of the vectors, resulting in complex transmission dynamics, including intermittent epidemics and an unclear li...

Increasingly, the potential short and long-term impacts of climate change on human health and wellbeing are being demonstrated. However, other environmental change factors, particularly relating to the natural environment, need to be taken into account to understand the totality of these interactions and impacts. This paper provides an overview of...

Background: To understand the impact of weather on infectious diseases, information on weather parameters at patient locations is needed, but this is not always accessible due to confidentiality or data availability. Weather parameters at nearby locations are often used as a proxy, but the accuracy of this practice is not known. Methods: Daily C...

Animal-borne or zoonotic human diseases (e.g., SARS, Rabies) represent major health and economic burdens throughout the world, disproportionately impacting poor communities. In 2013-2016, an outbreak of the Ebola virus disease (EVD), a zoonotic disease spread from animal reservoirs caused by the Zaire Ebola virus (EBOV), infected approximately 30,0...

The introduction of pasteurization, antibiotics, and vaccinations, as well as improved sanitation, hygiene, and education, were critical in reducing the burden of infectious diseases and associated mortality during the 19th and 20th centuries and were driven by an improved understanding of disease transmission. This advance has led to longer averag...

Infectious diseases attributable to unsafe water supply, sanitation and hygiene (e.g. Cholera, Leptospirosis, Giardiasis) remain an important cause of morbidity and mortality, especially in low-income countries. Climate and weather factors are known to affect the transmission and distribution of infectious diseases and statistical and mathematical...

High resolution, zoomable image for Fig 5. (TIFF)

Technical keywords/expressions used in the documents. (DOCX)

List of search words used for the MEDLINE database. (DOC)

List of included papers. (XLSX)

Understanding the emergence and subsequent spread of human infectious diseases is a critical global challenge, especially for high-impact zoonotic and vector-borne diseases. Global climate and land-use change are likely to alter host and vector distributions, but understanding the impact of these changes on the burden of infectious diseases is diff...

This paper argues for an integrative modelling approach for understanding zoonoses disease dynamics, combining process, pattern and participatory models. Each type of modelling provides important insights, but all are limited. Combining these in a ‘3P’ approach offers the opportunity for a productive conversation between modelling efforts, contribu...

This paper argues for an integrative modelling approach for understanding zoonoses disease dynamics, combining process, pattern and participatory models. Each type of modelling provides important insights, but all are limited. Combining these in a ‘3P’ approach offers the opportunity for a productive conversation between modelling efforts, contribu...

A considerable amount of disease is transmitted from animals to humans and many of these zoonoses are neglected tropical diseases. As outbreaks of SARS, avian influenza and Ebola have demonstrated, however, zoonotic diseases are serious threats to global public health and are not just problems confined to remote regions. There are two fundamental,...

Effective Reproductive Number for the simulation generated by the ABM (Zoonotic Spillover with human-to-human transmission). (PDF)

List of symbols and glossary. (PDF)

Effect of number of trials. (PDF)

Temporal variations in the parameters. (PDF)

Alternative mechanisms leading to a Negative-Binomial. (PDF)

Overview of different models. (PDF)

Value of the parameters used in the numerics. (PDF)

Analytical solutions for the mean cumulative number of infections for some special cases. (PDF)

Application to Lassa Fever. Zoonotic Spillover with human-to-human transmission when random effect in the rate are important. (PDF)

Relationships between parameters of Poisson and negative binomial distributions. (PDF)

Effects of different functional forms of the exposure and prevalence on the rate of spillovers. (PDF)

Transition probabilities for the ABM. (PDF)

Cumulative number of infections arising from human-to-human transmission and zoonotic spillover and no depletion of susceptibles generated by the ABM. (PDF)

Effect of human population size. (PDF)

This review outlines the benefits of using multiple approaches to improve model design and facilitate multidisciplinary research into infectious diseases, as well as showing and proposing practical examples of effective integration. It looks particularly at the benefits of using participatory research in conjunction with traditional modelling metho...

Background: Biting midges of the genus Culicoides Latreille, 1809 (Diptera: Ceratopogonidae) cause a significant biting nuisance to equines and are responsible for the biological transmission of African horse sickness virus (AHSV). While currently restricted in distribution to sub-Saharan Africa, AHSV has a history of emergence into southern Europ...

Background Zoonotic infections, which transmit from animals to humans, form the majority of new human pathogens. Following zoonotic transmission, the pathogen may already have, or may acquire, the ability to transmit from human to human. With infections such as Lassa fever (LF), an often fatal, rodent-borne, hemorrhagic fever common in areas of Wes...

Lassa fever is an acute, sometimes severe haemorrhagic infection caused by the Lassa virus and transmitted by the multimammate rat, Mastomys natalensis. It is endemic in parts of West Africa, including eastern Sierra Leone where the Dynamic Drivers of Disease in Africa Consortium (www.driversofdisease.org) is working. There is little information on...

Understanding the influence of non-susceptible hosts on vector-borne disease transmission is an important epidemiological problem. However, investigation of its impact can be complicated by uncertainty in the location of the hosts. Estimating the risk of transmission of African horse sickness (AHS) in Great Britain (GB), a virus transmitted by Culi...

Increasing the durability of crop resistance to plant pathogens is one of the key goals of virulence management. Despite the recognition of the importance of demographic and environmental stochasticity on the dynamics of an epidemic, their effects on the evolution of the pathogen and durability of resistance has not received attention. We formulate...

The National Equine Database (NED) contains information on the size and distribution of the horse population, but the data quality remains unknown. These data could assist with surveillance, research and contingency planning for equine infectious disease outbreaks. 1) To assess the extent of obsolete and missing data from NED, 2) evaluate the exten...

Disease resistance genes are valuable natural resources which should be deployed in a way which maximises the gain to crop productivity before they lose efficacy. Here we present a general epidemiological model for plant diseases, formulated to study the evolution of phenotypic traits of plant pathogens in response to host resistance. The model was...

Comprehension of the nature and practice of science and its social context are important aspects of communicating and learning science. However there is still very little understanding amongt the non-scientific community of the need for debate in driving scientific knowledge forward and the role of critical scrutiny in quality control. Peer review...

Four different searching strategies to locate the source of odor in turbulent flows have been computationally tested. These algorithms can be separated into two classes. One is based on the rate of odor patches encountered by the searcher, the other employs the variation of odor concentrations as well as the rate of odor patches experienced by the...

Transport and deposition of aerosol particles in a plane channel with a ribbed wall are studied in order to investigate the effects of the turbulent flow structure on particle deposition. In this paper, kinematic simulation (KS) has been adapted to be a sub-grid model for particles, in conjunction with large eddy simulation (LES) in real space with...

Predictions for the number of particles depositing from fully developed turbulence onto a fully roughened k-type surface are obtained from the results of large-eddy simulations for a ribbed-channel flow. Simulation data are found to provide only partial support for the "mass-sink hypothesis," i.e., the notion that all particles entering a mass sink...

Rice’s theory for the statistical properties of random noise currents has been employed in the context of concentration fluctuations in dispersing plumes. Within this context, the theory has been extended to calculate the distribution of excursion times above a small threshold for arbitrary spacings between an up-crossing and the successive down-cr...

We develop a stochastic model for the time-evolution of scalar concentrations and temporal gradients in concentration experienced by observers moving within inhomogeneous plumes that are dispersing within turbulent flows. In this model, scalar concentrations and their gradients evolve jointly as a Markovian process. Underlying the model formulation...

Transport and deposition of aerosol particles in a plane channel with a ribbed wall are studied to investigate the effects of turbulent flow structures on particle deposition. In this paper, kinematic simulation (KS) has been adapted to be a sub-grid model for particles, in conjunction with large eddy simulation (LES) simulation in real space. KS i...

Numerical simulations for a non-isothermal ribbed channel flow are made. Due to the relatively low Reynolds number (Re = 14,200, based on the channel height), the results have relevance to higher Reynolds number electronics cooling systems. Through considering a k–l based zonal large Eddy simulation (ZLES) method and the S–A based detached Eddy sim...

A Lagrangian stochastic model has been formulated to simulate the dispersion of Brownian (submicron-sized) particles in turbulent flows and their deposition onto adjacent flow boundaries. The model is applied to the prediction of Brownian-particle dispersion and deposition under non-isothermal conditions. Thermophoresis is shown to arise naturally...

Predictions for the deposition of spherical and cylindrical particles from a ribbed channel flow onto adjacent flow boundaries are obtained using large eddy simulation (LES) under the assumption of one-way coupling. Results indicate that spherical particles tend to accumulate on the vertical rib wall facing the mean-flow direction with little parti...

The key challenge in modelling particle motions in turbulent flows is to account correctly for differences between the evolution of fluid-velocities along particles trajectories and along fluid-particles trajectories. Most models available in the literature for the simulation of fluid-velocities along particles trajectories are incompatible with Ko...

The key challenge in modelling particle motions in turbulent flows is to account correctly for differences between the evolution of fluid-velocities along particles trajectories and along fluid-particles trajectories. Most models available in the literature for the simulation of fluid-velocities along particles trajectories are incompatible with Ko...

A Lagrangian stochastic model for the deposition of Brownian particles from a turbulent flow onto adjacent flow boundaries is formulated. The model is applied to systems with a gradient of temperature. Several aspects are focused on. First, the model requires a resolution of the generalized form of the Ito-Stratonvich paradox and reveals that parti...

We show how an incorrect prediction of the t-dependence of diffractive deep inelastic scattering in the Anisotropic Chromo-Dynamics (ACD) framework was due to the erroneous evaluation of colour-traces through the perturbation theory prescription. By employing the “colour filtering” required by colour confinement, good agreement with experiment is o...