Genetic drift and purifying selection shape within-host influenza A virus populations during natural swine infections.

Patterns of within-host influenza A virus (IAV) diversity and evolution have been described in natural human infections, but these patterns remain poorly characterized in non-human hosts. Elucidating these dynamics is important to better understand IAV biology and the evolutionary processes that govern spillover into humans. Here, we sampled an IAV outbreak in pigs during a week-long county fair to characterize viral diversity and evolution in this important reservoir host. Nasal wipes were collected on a daily basis from all pigs present at the fair, yielding up to 421 samples per day. Subtyping of PCR-positive samples revealed the co-circulation of H1N1 and H3N2 subtype swine IAVs. PCR-positive samples with robust Ct values were deep-sequenced, yielding 506 sequenced samples from a total of 253 pigs. Based on higher-depth re-sequenced data from a subset of these initially sequenced samples (260 samples from 168 pigs), we characterized patterns of within-host IAV genetic diversity and evolution. We find that IAV genetic diversity in single-subtype infected pigs is low, with the majority of intrahost Single Nucleotide Variants (iSNVs) present at frequencies of <10%. The ratio of the number of nonsynonymous to the number of synonymous iSNVs is significantly lower than under the neutral expectation, indicating that purifying selection shapes patterns of within-host viral diversity in swine. The dynamic turnover of iSNVs and their pronounced frequency changes further indicate that genetic drift also plays an important role in shaping IAV populations within pigs. Taken together, our results highlight similarities in patterns of IAV genetic diversity and evolution between humans and swine, including the role of stochastic processes in shaping within-host IAV dynamics.

Comparing and linking machine learning and semi-mechanistic models for the predictability of endemic measles dynamics.

Measles is one the best-documented and most-mechanistically-studied non-linear infectious disease dynamical systems. However, systematic investigation into the comparative performance of traditional mechanistic models and machine learning approaches in forecasting the transmission dynamics of this pathogen are still rare. Here, we compare one of the most widely used semi-mechanistic models for measles (TSIR) with a commonly used machine learning approach (LASSO), comparing performance and limits in predicting short to long term outbreak trajectories and seasonality for both regular and less regular measles outbreaks in England and Wales (E&W) and the United States. First, our results indicate that the proposed LASSO model can efficiently use data from multiple major cities and achieve similar short-to-medium term forecasting performance to semi-mechanistic models for E&W epidemics. Second, interestingly, the LASSO model also captures annual to biennial bifurcation of measles epidemics in E&W caused by susceptible response to the late 1940s baby boom. LASSO may also outperform TSIR for predicting less-regular dynamics such as those observed in major cities in US between 1932-45. Although both approaches capture short-term forecasts, accuracy suffers for both methods as we attempt longer-term predictions in highly irregular, post-vaccination outbreaks in E&W. Finally, we illustrate that the LASSO model can both qualitatively and quantitatively reconstruct mechanistic assumptions, notably susceptible dynamics, in the TSIR model. Our results characterize the limits of predictability of infectious disease dynamics for strongly immunizing pathogens with both mechanistic and machine learning models, and identify connections between these two approaches.

Characterizing superspreading events and age-specific infectiousness of SARS-CoV-2 transmission in Georgia, USA.

It is imperative to advance our understanding of heterogeneities in the transmission of SARS-CoV-2 such as age-specific infectiousness and superspreading. To this end, it is important to exploit multiple data streams that are becoming abundantly available during the pandemic. In this paper, we formulate an individual-level spatiotemporal mechanistic framework to integrate individual surveillance data with geolocation data and aggregate mobility data, enabling a more granular understanding of the transmission dynamics of SARS-CoV-2. We analyze reported cases, between March and early May 2020, in five (urban and rural) counties in the state of Georgia. First, our results show that the reproductive number reduced to below one in about 2 wk after the shelter-in-place order. Superspreading appears to be widespread across space and time, and it may have a particularly important role in driving the outbreak in rural areas and an increasing importance toward later stages of outbreaks in both urban and rural settings. Overall, about 2% of cases were directly responsible for 20% of all infections. We estimate that the infected nonelderly cases (<60 y) may be 2.78 [2.10, 4.22] times more infectious than the elderly, and the former tend to be the main driver of superspreading. Our results improve our understanding of the natural history and transmission dynamics of SARS-CoV-2. More importantly, we reveal the roles of age-specific infectiousness and characterize systematic variations and associated risk factors of superspreading. These have important implications for the planning of relaxing social distancing and, more generally, designing optimal control measures.

Estimating the Cumulative Incidence of SARS-CoV-2 Infection and the Infection Fatality Ratio in Light of Waning Antibodies.

BACKGROUND: Serology tests can identify previous infections and facilitate estimation of the number of total infections. However, immunoglobulins targeting severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) have been reported to wane below the detectable level of serologic assays (which is not necessarily equivalent to the duration of protective immunity). We estimate the cumulative incidence of SARS-CoV-2 infection from serology studies, accounting for expected levels of antibody acquisition (seroconversion) and waning (seroreversion), and apply this framework using data from New York City and Connecticut. METHODS: We estimated time from seroconversion to seroreversion and infection fatality ratio (IFR) using mortality data from March to October 2020 and population-level cross-sectional seroprevalence data from April to August 2020 in New York City and Connecticut. We then estimated the daily seroprevalence and cumulative incidence of SARS-CoV-2 infection. RESULTS: The estimated average time from seroconversion to seroreversion was 3-4 months. The estimated IFR was 1.1% (95% credible interval, 1.0%, 1.2%) in New York City and 1.4% (1.1, 1.7%) in Connecticut. The estimated daily seroprevalence declined after a peak in the spring. The estimated cumulative incidence reached 26.8% (24.2%, 29.7%) at the end of September in New York City and 8.8% (7.1%, 11.3%) in Connecticut, higher than maximum seroprevalence measures (22.1% and 6.1%), respectively. CONCLUSIONS: The cumulative incidence of SARS-CoV-2 infection is underestimated using cross-sectional serology data without adjustment for waning antibodies. Our approach can help quantify the magnitude of underestimation and adjust estimates for waning antibodies.

Model diagnostics and refinement for phylodynamic models.

Phylodynamic modelling, which studies the joint dynamics of epidemiological and evolutionary processes, has made significant progress in recent years due to increasingly available genomic data and advances in statistical modelling. These advances have greatly improved our understanding of transmission dynamics of many important pathogens. Nevertheless, there remains a lack of effective, targetted diagnostic tools for systematically detecting model mis-specification. Development of such tools is essential for model criticism, refinement, and calibration. The idea of utilising latent residuals for model assessment has already been exploited in general spatio-temporal epidemiological settings. Specifically, by proposing appropriately designed non-centered, re-parameterizations of a given epidemiological process, one can construct latent residuals with known sampling distributions which can be used to quantify evidence of model mis-specification. In this paper, we extend this idea to formulate a novel model-diagnostic framework for phylodynamic models. Using simulated examples, we show that our framework may effectively detect a particular form of mis-specification in a phylodynamic model, particularly in the event of superspreading. We also exemplify our approach by applying the framework to a dataset describing a local foot-and-mouth (FMD) outbreak in the UK, eliciting strong evidence against the assumption of no within-host-diversity in the outbreak. We further demonstrate that our framework can facilitate model calibration in real-life scenarios, by proposing a within-host-diversity model which appears to offer a better fit to data than one that assumes no within-host-diversity of FMD virus.

Spatial and temporal dynamics of superspreading events in the 2014-2015 West Africa Ebola epidemic.

The unprecedented scale of the Ebola outbreak in Western Africa (2014-2015) has prompted an explosion of efforts to understand the transmission dynamics of the virus and to analyze the performance of possible containment strategies. Models have focused primarily on the reproductive numbers of the disease that represent the average number of secondary infections produced by a random infectious individual. However, these population-level estimates may conflate important systematic variation in the number of cases generated by infected individuals, particularly found in spatially localized transmission and superspreading events. Although superspreading features prominently in first-hand narratives of Ebola transmission, its dynamics have not been systematically characterized, hindering refinements of future epidemic predictions and explorations of targeted interventions. We used Bayesian model inference to integrate individual-level spatial information with other epidemiological data of community-based (undetected within clinical-care systems) cases and to explicitly infer distribution of the cases generated by each infected individual. Our results show that superspreaders play a key role in sustaining onward transmission of the epidemic, and they are responsible for a significant proportion ([Formula: see text]61%) of the infections. Our results also suggest age as a key demographic predictor for superspreading. We also show that community-based cases may have progressed more rapidly than those notified within clinical-care systems, and most transmission events occurred in a relatively short distance (with median value of 2.51 km). Our results stress the importance of characterizing superspreading of Ebola, enhance our current understanding of its spatiotemporal dynamics, and highlight the potential importance of targeted control measures.

A mechanistic spatio-temporal framework for modelling individual-to-individual transmission-With an application to the 2014-2015 West Africa Ebola outbreak.

In recent years there has been growing availability of individual-level spatio-temporal disease data, particularly due to the use of modern communicating devices with GPS tracking functionality. These detailed data have been proven useful for inferring disease transmission to a more refined level than previously. However, there remains a lack of statistically sound frameworks to model the underlying transmission dynamic in a mechanistic manner. Such a development is particularly crucial for enabling a general epidemic predictive framework at the individual level. In this paper we propose a new statistical framework for mechanistically modelling individual-to-individual disease transmission in a landscape with heterogeneous population density. Our methodology is first tested using simulated datasets, validating our inferential machinery. The methodology is subsequently applied to data that describes a regional Ebola outbreak in Western Africa (2014-2015). Our results show that the methods are able to obtain estimates of key epidemiological parameters that are broadly consistent with the literature, while revealing a significantly shorter distance of transmission. More importantly, in contrast to existing approaches, we are able to perform a more general model prediction that takes into account the susceptible population. Finally, our results show that, given reasonable scenarios, the framework can be an effective surrogate for susceptible-explicit individual models which are often computationally challenging.

Inferring influenza dynamics and control in households.

Household-based interventions are the mainstay of public health policy against epidemic respiratory pathogens when vaccination is not available. Although the efficacy of these interventions has traditionally been measured by their ability to reduce the proportion of household contacts who exhibit symptoms [household secondary attack rate (hSAR)], this metric is difficult to interpret and makes only partial use of data collected by modern field studies. Here, we use Bayesian transmission model inference to analyze jointly both symptom reporting and viral shedding data from a three-armed study of influenza interventions. The reduction in hazard of infection in the increased hand hygiene intervention arm was 37.0% [8.3%, 57.8%], whereas the equivalent reduction in the other intervention arm was 27.2% [-0.46%, 52.3%] (increased hand hygiene and face masks). By imputing the presence and timing of unobserved infection, we estimated that only 61.7% [43.1%, 76.9%] of infections met the case criteria and were thus detected by the study design. An assessment of interventions using inferred infections produced more intuitively consistent attack rates when households were stratified by the speed of intervention, compared with the crude hSAR. Compared with adults, children were 2.29 [1.66, 3.23] times as infectious and 3.36 [2.31, 4.82] times as susceptible. The mean generation time was 3.39 d [3.06, 3.70]. Laboratory confirmation of infections by RT-PCR was only able to detect 79.6% [76.5%, 83.0%] of symptomatic infections, even at the peak of shedding. Our results highlight the potential use of robust inference with well-designed mechanistic transmission models to improve the design of intervention studies.

A Systematic Bayesian Integration of Epidemiological and Genetic Data.

Genetic sequence data on pathogens have great potential to inform inference of their transmission dynamics ultimately leading to better disease control. Where genetic change and disease transmission occur on comparable timescales additional information can be inferred via the joint analysis of such genetic sequence data and epidemiological observations based on clinical symptoms and diagnostic tests. Although recently introduced approaches represent substantial progress, for computational reasons they approximate genuine joint inference of disease dynamics and genetic change in the pathogen population, capturing partially the joint epidemiological-evolutionary dynamics. Improved methods are needed to fully integrate such genetic data with epidemiological observations, for achieving a more robust inference of the transmission tree and other key epidemiological parameters such as latent periods. Here, building on current literature, a novel Bayesian framework is proposed that infers simultaneously and explicitly the transmission tree and unobserved transmitted pathogen sequences. Our framework facilitates the use of realistic likelihood functions and enables systematic and genuine joint inference of the epidemiological-evolutionary process from partially observed outbreaks. Using simulated data it is shown that this approach is able to infer accurately joint epidemiological-evolutionary dynamics, even when pathogen sequences and epidemiological data are incomplete, and when sequences are available for only a fraction of exposures. These results also characterise and quantify the value of incomplete and partial sequence data, which has important implications for sampling design, and demonstrate the abilities of the introduced method to identify multiple clusters within an outbreak. The framework is used to analyse an outbreak of foot-and-mouth disease in the UK, enhancing current understanding of its transmission dynamics and evolutionary process.

Genetic drift and purifying selection shape within-host influenza A virus populations during natural swine infections.

Patterns of within-host influenza A virus (IAV) diversity and evolution have been described in natural human infections, but these patterns remain poorly characterized in non-human hosts. Elucidating these dynamics is important to better understand IAV biology and the evolutionary processes that govern spillover into humans. Here, we sampled an IAV outbreak in pigs during a week-long county fair to characterize viral diversity and evolution in this important reservoir host. Nasal wipes were collected on a daily basis from all pigs present at the fair, yielding up to 421 samples per day. Subtyping of PCR-positive samples revealed the co-circulation of H1N1 and H3N2 subtype IAVs. PCR-positive samples with robust Ct values were deep-sequenced, yielding 506 sequenced samples from a total of 253 pigs. Based on higher-depth re-sequenced data from a subset of these initially sequenced samples (260 samples from 168 pigs), we characterized patterns of within-host IAV genetic diversity and evolution. We find that IAV genetic diversity in single-subtype infected pigs is low, with the majority of intra-host single nucleotide variants (iSNVs) present at frequencies of <10%. The ratio of the number of nonsynonymous to the number of synonymous iSNVs is significantly lower than under the neutral expectation, indicating that purifying selection shapes patterns of within-host viral diversity in swine. The dynamic turnover of iSNVs and their pronounced frequency changes further indicate that genetic drift also plays an important role in shaping IAV populations within pigs. Taken together, our results highlight similarities in patterns of IAV genetic diversity and evolution between humans and swine, including the role of stochastic processes in shaping within-host IAV dynamics.

Post-lockdown changes of age-specific susceptibility and its correlation with adherence to social distancing measures.

Social distancing measures are effective in reducing overall community transmission but much remains unknown about how they have impacted finer-scale dynamics. In particular, much is unknown about how changes of contact patterns and other behaviors including adherence to social distancing, induced by these measures, may have impacted finer-scale transmission dynamics among different age groups. In this paper, we build a stochastic age-specific transmission model to systematically characterize the degree and variation of age-specific transmission dynamics, before and after lifting the lockdown in Georgia, USA. We perform Bayesian (missing-)data-augmentation model inference, leveraging reported age-specific case, seroprevalence and mortality data. We estimate that overall population-level transmissibility was reduced to 41.2% with 95% CI [39%, 43.8%] of the pre-lockdown level in about a week of the announcement of the shelter-in-place order. Although it subsequently increased after the lockdown was lifted, it only bounced back to 62% [58%, 67.2%] of the pre-lockdown level after about a month. We also find that during the lockdown susceptibility to infection increases with age. Specifically, relative to the oldest age group (> 65+), susceptibility for the youngest age group (0-17 years) is 0.13 [0.09, 0.18], and it increases to 0.53 [0.49, 0.59] for 18-44 and 0.75 [0.68, 0.82] for 45-64. More importantly, our results reveal clear changes of age-specific susceptibility (defined as average risk of getting infected during an infectious contact incorporating age-dependent behavioral factors) after the lockdown was lifted, with a trend largely consistent with reported age-specific adherence levels to social distancing and preventive measures. Specifically, the older groups (> 45) (with the highest levels of adherence) appear to have the most significant reductions of susceptibility (e.g., post-lockdown susceptibility reduced to 31.6% [29.3%, 34%] of the estimate before lifting the lockdown for the 6+ group). Finally, we find heterogeneity in case reporting among different age groups, with the lowest rate occurring among the 0-17 group (9.7% [6.4%, 19%]). Our results provide a more fundamental understanding of the impacts of stringent lockdown measures, and finer evidence that other social distancing and preventive measures may be effective in reducing SARS-CoV-2 transmission. These results may be exploited to guide more effective implementations of these measures in many current settings (with low vaccination rate globally and emerging variants) and in future potential outbreaks of novel pathogens.

The feasibility of age-specific travel restrictions during influenza pandemics.

BACKGROUND: Epidemiological studies have shown that imposing travel restrictions to prevent or delay an influenza pandemic may not be feasible. To delay an epidemic substantially, an extremely high proportion of trips (~99%) would have to be restricted in a homogeneously mixing population. Influenza is, however, strongly influenced by age-dependent transmission dynamics, and the effectiveness of age-specific travel restrictions, such as the selective restriction of travel by children, has yet to be examined. METHODS: A simple stochastic model was developed to describe the importation of infectious cases into a population and to model local chains of transmission seeded by imported cases. The probability of a local epidemic, and the time period until a major epidemic takes off, were used as outcome measures, and travel restriction policies in which children or adults were preferentially restricted were compared to age-blind restriction policies using an age-dependent next generation matrix parameterized for influenza H1N1-2009. RESULTS: Restricting children from travelling would yield greater reductions to the short-term risk of the epidemic being established locally than other policy options considered, and potentially could delay an epidemic for a few weeks. However, given a scenario with a total of 500 imported cases over a period of a few months, a substantial reduction in the probability of an epidemic in this time period is possible only if the transmission potential were low and assortativity (i.e. the proportion of contacts within-group) were unrealistically high. In all other scenarios considered, age-structured travel restrictions would not prevent an epidemic and would not delay the epidemic for longer than a few weeks. CONCLUSIONS: Selectively restricting children from traveling overseas during a pandemic may potentially delay its arrival for a few weeks, depending on the characteristics of the pandemic strain, but could have less of an impact on the economy compared to restricting adult travelers. However, as long as adults have at least a moderate potential to trigger an epidemic, selectively restricting the higher risk group (children) may not be a practical option to delay the arrival of an epidemic substantially.

The effective reproduction number of pandemic influenza: prospective estimation.

BACKGROUND: Timely estimation of the transmissibility of a novel pandemic influenza virus was a public health priority in 2009. METHODS: We extended methods for prospective estimation of the effective reproduction number (Rt) over time in an emerging epidemic to allow for reporting delays and repeated importations. We estimated Rt based on case notifications and hospitalizations associated with laboratory-confirmed pandemic (H1N1) 2009 virus infections in Hong Kong from June through October 2009. RESULTS: Rt declined from around 1.4-1.5 at the start of the local epidemic to around 1.1-1.2 later in the summer, suggesting changes in transmissibility perhaps related to school vacations or seasonality. Estimates of Rt based on hospitalizations of confirmed H1N1 cases closely matched estimates based on case notifications. CONCLUSION: Real-time monitoring of the effective reproduction number is feasible and can provide useful information to public health authorities for situational awareness and calibration of mitigation strategies.

A competing-risks model explains hierarchical spatial coupling of measles epidemics en route to national elimination.

Apart from its global health importance, measles is a paradigm for the low-dimensional mechanistic understanding of local nonlinear population interactions. A central question for spatio-temporal dynamics is the relative roles of hierarchical spread from large cities to small towns and metapopulation transmission among local small population clusters in measles persistence. Quantifying this balance is critical to planning the regional elimination and global eradication of measles. Yet, current gravity models do not allow a formal comparison of hierarchical versus metapopulation spread. We address this gap with a competing-risks framework, capturing the relative importance of competing sources of reintroductions of infection. We apply the method to the uniquely spatio-temporally detailed urban incidence dataset for measles in England and Wales, from 1944 to the infection's vaccine-induced nadir in the 1990s. We find that despite the regional influence of a few large cities (for example, London and Liverpool), metapopulation aggregation in neighbouring towns and cities played an important role in driving national dynamics in the prevaccination era. As vaccination levels increased in the 1970s and 1980s, the signature of spatially predictable spread diminished: increasingly, infection was introduced from unidentifiable random sources possibly outside regional metapopulations. The resulting erratic dynamics highlight the challenges of identifying shifting sources of infection and characterizing patterns of incidence in times of high vaccination coverage. More broadly, the underlying incidence and demographic data, accompanying this paper, will also provide an important resource for exploring nonlinear spatiotemporal population dynamics.

Transmission network reconstruction for foot-and-mouth disease outbreaks incorporating farm-level covariates.

Transmission network modelling to infer 'who infected whom' in infectious disease outbreaks is a highly active area of research. Outbreaks of foot-and-mouth disease have been a key focus of transmission network models that integrate genomic and epidemiological data. The aim of this study was to extend Lau's systematic Bayesian inference framework to incorporate additional parameters representing predominant species and numbers of animals held on a farm. Lau's Bayesian Markov chain Monte Carlo algorithm was reformulated, verified and pseudo-validated on 100 simulated outbreaks populated with demographic data Japan and Australia. The modified model was then implemented on genomic and epidemiological data from the 2010 outbreak of foot-and-mouth disease in Japan, and outputs compared to those from the SCOTTI model implemented in BEAST2. The modified model achieved improvements in overall accuracy when tested on the simulated outbreaks. When implemented on the actual outbreak data from Japan, infected farms that held predominantly pigs were estimated to have five times the transmissibility of infected cattle farms and be 49% less susceptible. The farm-level incubation period was 1 day shorter than the latent period, the timing of the seeding of the outbreak in Japan was inferred, as were key linkages between clusters and features of farms involved in widespread dissemination of this outbreak. To improve accessibility the modified model has been implemented as the R package 'BORIS' for use in future outbreaks.

Inferring who-infected-whom-where in the 2016 Zika outbreak in Singapore-a spatio-temporal model.

Singapore experienced its first known Zika outbreak in 2016. Given the lack of herd immunity, the suitability of the climate for pathogen transmission, and the year-round presence of the vector- Aedes aegypti-Zika had the potential to become endemic, like dengue. Guillain-Barré syndrome and microcephaly are severe complications associated elsewhere with Zika and the risk of these complications makes understanding its spread imperative. We investigated the spatio-temporal spread of locally transmitted Zika in Singapore and assessed the relevance of non-residential transmission of Zika virus infections, by inferring the possible infection tree (i.e. who-infected-whom-where) and comparing inferences using geographically resolved data on cases' home, their work, or their home and work. We developed a spatio-temporal model using time of onset and both addresses of the Zika-confirmed cases between July and September 2016 to estimate the infection tree using Bayesian data augmentation. Workplaces were involved in a considerable fraction (64.2%) of infections, and homes and workplaces may be distant relative to the scale of transmission, allowing ambulant infected persons may act as the 'vector' infecting distant parts of the country. Contact tracing is a challenge for mosquito-borne diseases, but inferring the geographically structured transmission tree sheds light on the spatial transmission of Zika to immunologically naive regions of the country.

Unreported cases in the 2014-2016 Ebola epidemic: Spatiotemporal variation, and implications for estimating transmission.

In the recent 2014-2016 Ebola epidemic in West Africa, non-hospitalized cases were an important component of the chain of transmission. However, non-hospitalized cases are at increased risk of going unreported because of barriers to access to healthcare. Furthermore, underreporting rates may fluctuate over space and time, biasing estimates of disease transmission rates, which are important for understanding spread and planning control measures. We performed a retrospective analysis on community deaths during the recent Ebola epidemic in Sierra Leone to estimate the number of unreported non-hospitalized cases, and to quantify how Ebola reporting rates varied across locations and over time. We then tested if variation in reporting rates affected the estimates of disease transmission rates that were used in surveillance and response. We found significant variation in reporting rates among districts, and district-specific rates of increase in reporting over time. Correcting time series of numbers of cases for variable reporting rates led, in some instances, to different estimates of the time-varying reproduction number of the epidemic, particularly outside the capital. Future analyses that compare Ebola transmission rates over time and across locations may be improved by considering the impacts of differential reporting rates.

New model diagnostics for spatio-temporal systems in epidemiology and ecology.

A cardinal challenge in epidemiological and ecological modelling is to develop effective and easily deployed tools for model assessment. The availability of such methods would greatly improve understanding, prediction and management of disease and ecosystems. Conventional Bayesian model assessment tools such as Bayes factors and the deviance information criterion (DIC) are natural candidates but suffer from important limitations because of their sensitivity and complexity. Posterior predictive checks, which use summary statistics of the observed process simulated from competing models, can provide a measure of model fit but appropriate statistics can be difficult to identify. Here, we develop a novel approach for diagnosing mis-specifications of a general spatio-temporal transmission model by embedding classical ideas within a Bayesian analysis. Specifically, by proposing suitably designed non-centred parametrization schemes, we construct latent residuals whose sampling properties are known given the model specification and which can be used to measure overall fit and to elicit evidence of the nature of mis-specifications of spatial and temporal processes included in the model. This model assessment approach can readily be implemented as an addendum to standard estimation algorithms for sampling from the posterior distributions, for example Markov chain Monte Carlo. The proposed methodology is first tested using simulated data and subsequently applied to data describing the spread of Heracleum mantegazzianum (giant hogweed) across Great Britain over a 30-year period. The proposed methods are compared with alternative techniques including posterior predictive checking and the DIC. Results show that the proposed diagnostic tools are effective in assessing competing stochastic spatio-temporal transmission models and may offer improvements in power to detect model mis-specifications. Moreover, the latent-residual framework introduced here extends readily to a broad range of ecological and epidemiological models.