Waterborne, abiotic and other indirectly transmitted (W.A.I.T.) infections are defined by the dynamics of free-living pathogens and environmental reservoirs

Miles D. Miller-Dickson; Victor A. Meszaros; Francis Baffour-Awuah; Salvador Almagro-Moreno; C. Brandon Ogbunugafor

The epidemic is then driven by a series of interactions: interactions between uninfected (susceptible) hosts S and the infected (transmitting) environmental compartment W i and interactions between infected individuals I and the uninfected environmental compartment W u . The epidemic is sustained through infected hosts I depositing pathogen into the environmental intermediate, creating new infection in the reservoir, which can then interact with and infect more susceptible hosts S, in a process resembling a feedback loop. The dynamics of such a system as we have chosen to model them are captured by the set of dynamical equations below and can be visualized in Figure 1 . A derivation of the terms in the model can be read in the Supplemental Appendix.