Tick-Borne diseases can be transmitted via non-systemic (NS) transmission.
This occurs when tick gets the infection by co-feeding with infected ticks on
the same host resulting in a direct pathogen transmission between the vectors,
without infecting the host. This transmission is peculiar, as it does not
require any systemic infection of the host. The NS transmission is the main
efficient transmission for the persistence of the Tick-Borne Encephalitis virus
in nature. By describing the heterogeneous ticks aggregation on hosts through a
\hyphenation{dynamical} bipartite graphs representation, we are able to
mathematically define the NS transmission and to depict the epidemiological
conditions for the pathogen persistence. Despite the fact that the underlying
network is largely fragmented, analytical and computational results show that
the larger is the variability of the aggregation, and the easier is for the
pathogen to persist in the population.Comment: 15 pages, 4 figures, to be published in Communications in Nonlinear
Science and Numerical Simulatio
