Did new transmission cycles in anthropogenic, dense, host populations encourage the emergence and speciation of pathogenic bordetella?

Abstract

Until the advent of vaccines in the mid 1950s, whooping cough (pertussis) was among the most prevalent and deadly diseases for children in the United States [1, 2] and still remains a worldwide problem, particularly for developing countries [3]. But unlike similarly distinctive human diseases described thousands of years earlier, records of whooping cough emerged only a few hundred years ago. The severe and distinctive cough facilitates such rapid spread of Bordetella pertussis that epidemics rapidly burn through populations and require a critical community size large enough to sustain the organism through interepidemic periods [4]. The concept that increasingly dense and interconnected human populations facilitated the emergence of the virulent form of B. pertussiscan be applied to the emergence of other Bordetella species, as discussed below.