Dynamics of Interacting Contagions

Arguably, no scientific concept encapsulates the human experience as much as contagions. Contagions help us understand how we live and how we die as we use the concept to model human reproduction, teaching, cultural evolution, viral trends, scientific ideas, misinformation, social movements, and obviously infectious diseases.

Although all of these phenomena interact to shape human life, they are unfortunately often studied in isolation, one at a time. Importantly, epidemics are generally shaped by multiple factors drawn anywhere from biological sciences (pathogens, genetics, microbiome) to social sciences (information, culture, behavior) and in between (nutrition, life history, living environment). Social contagions, like stories and ideas, are not much different as narrative elements interact both within a story and across each other as well as with culture, socioeconomical status, and even environmental factors. These interactions between things that spread are the norm rather than the exceptions but embracing them requires us to rethink how we study contagions.

This Collection aims to assemble examples, case studies, perspectives, models and frameworks to explore this new interdisciplinary science.  The ultimate objective being to go beyond the “one pathogen equals one contagion” paradigm and attempt to understand how contagions interact beyond the simplest toy models. We hope to contribute to a dialogue between researchers from infectious diseases, mathematical modeling, digital humanities, network theory, psychology, and the study of myths and misinformation. To do so, we welcome original articles, perspective papers, and comments from all fields that contribute to a conversation across disciplines to rethink the study of contagions and embrace interactions between phenomena.  Themes of the contributions could include, but are not limited to:

• Interactions between infectious diseases (across strains of a pathogens or different pathogens).
• Ecological approaches to coexistence.
• Interactions between epidemics and information.
• Interplay of adaptive human behaviour and contagions.
• Spread of myths and misinformation.
• And much more.