Coinfection and the evolution of drug resistance

Recent experimental work in the rodent malaria model has shown that when two or more strains share a host, there is competitive release of drug-resistant strains upon treatment. In other words, the propagule output of a particular strain is repressed when competing with other strains and increases upon the removal of this competition. This within-host effect is predicted to have an important impact on the evolution and growth of resistant strains. However, how this effect translates to epidemiological parameters at the between-host level, the level at which disease and resistance spread, has yet to be determined. Here we present a general, between-host epidemiological model that explicitly takes into account the effect of coinfection and competitive release. Although our model does show that when there is coinfection competitive release may contribute to the emergence of resistance, it also highlights an additional between-host effect. It is the combination of these two effects, the between-host effect and the within-host effect, that determines the overall influence of coinfection on the emergence of resistance. Therefore, even when competitive release of drug-resistant strains occurs, within an infected individual, it is not necessarily true that coinfection will result in the increased emergence of resistance. These results have important implications for the control of the emergence and spread of drug resistance.