Pneumococcus is a major cause of pneumonia, meningitis and sepsis worldwide.
A study published in 2011 Natureis uncovering new ways to use anonymized mobile phone data to map the spread and evolution of pathogens and their response to vaccines and antibiotics, helping to predict and prevent future outbreaks.
The study involved researchers from the Wellcome Sanger Institute, the University of the Witwatersrand, the South African National Institute for Communicable Diseases and the University of Cambridge, as well as partners in the Global Pneumococcal Sequencing Project.
Infectious diseases such as tuberculosis, HIV, and COVID-19 have multiple strains or variants circulating simultaneously.
Streptococcus pneumoniae (the pneumococcus), a major cause of pneumonia, meningitis, and sepsis worldwide, has over 100 species and over 900 genetic strains worldwide.
The researchers combined genomic data from 6,910 pneumococcal samples collected in South Africa between 2000 and 2014 with anonymized human mobility patterns collected by Meta2 using mobile phone data to examine how the bacteria moves between regions and evolves over time.
Using computational modelling, the team found that it would take around 50 years for the pneumococcal strain to fully integrate into the entire South African population, mainly due to regional human migration patterns.
Even though pneumococcal vaccines against certain types of bacteria in 2009 reduced the number of cases caused by those types, other non-target strains of these bacteria gained a 68% competitive advantage and became increasingly resistant to antibiotics, including penicillin, suggesting that any vaccine-associated protection against antibiotic resistance is only temporary.
According to the World Health Organization, antibiotic resistance is one of the top 10 global public health threats facing humanity. It occurs when bacteria, fungi and parasites change over time to adapt to antibiotics.
The new research may help improve vaccine development to target the most harmful bacterial strains, and “may also be applicable to other geographies and pathogens to better understand and predict pathogen spread in terms of drug resistance and vaccine efficacy,” said Dr Sophie Bellman, a former PhD student at the Wellcome Sanger Institute and lead author of the study.
