Effect of the initial dose of foot-and-mouth disease virus on the early viral dynamics within pigs

This paper investigates the early viral dynamics of foot-and-mouth disease (FMD) within infected pigs. Using an existing within-host model, we investigate whether individual variation can be explained by the effect of the initial dose of FMD virus. To do this, we consider the experimental data on the concentration of FMD virus genomes in the blood (viral load). In this experiment, 12 pigs were inoculated with one of three different doses of FMD virus: low; medium; or high. Measurements of the viral load were recorded over a time course of approximately 11 days for every 8 hours. The model is a set of deterministic differential equations with the following variables: viral load; virus in the interstitial space; and the proportion of epithelial cells available for infection, infected and uninfected. The model was fitted to the data for each animal individually and also simultaneously over all animals varying only the initial dose. We showthat the general trend in the data can be explained by varying only the initial dose. The higher the initial dose the earlier the development of a detectable viral load. © 2008 The Royal Society.