Quantitative Parasitology

Quantitative Parasitology

Quantifying parasites in a sample of hosts or comparing measures of infection across two or more samples can be challenging.

The parasitic infection of a sample of hosts inherently exhibits a complex pattern that cannot be adequately quantified by a single statistical measure. As the use of two or more separate indices is advisable, only two or more separate statistical tests can reliably compare infections different samples of hosts.

A few of the available statistical measures have markedly different biological interpretations, while others have more-or-less overlapping interpretations or no interpretations at all. Therefore, one should apply measures that have clear and separate biological interpretations thus do not predict each other.

Parasite individuals typically exhibit an aggregated (right-skewed) distribution among host individuals; most hosts harbour few if any parasites and a few hosts harbour many of them. This quantitative feature of parasitism renders many of traditional statistical methods obsolete and requires the use of advanced computer-intensive statistical methods.