The Evolution of Multiple Resistant Strains: An Abstract Model of Systemic Treatment and Accumulated Resistance

The proliferation of resistant strains has been an unintended side effect of human interventions designed to eliminate unwanted elements of our environment. Any attempt to destroy an adaptive population must also be considered as a selection pressure, so that the most resistant members will comprise the next generation. Procedures have been developed to slow the evolution of resistances in a population, with the most common approaches being overkill and treatment cycling. This paper presents an agent-based Susceptible-Infection-Susceptible (SIS) model to explore the effectiveness of these procedures on an abstract epidemic of pathogens, focusing on how the interaction between interventions and mutations affects acquired resistance. Illustrative findings indicate that overkill performed better than cycling treatments when variation in resistances had a high degree of heritability. When resistance variation was effectively memoryless, cycling and overkill performed comparably. However, overkill was prone to backlash outliers where an amplification of infection resistance occurred- a significant drawback to the overkill technique. These backlash events indicate that cycling interventions might be more effective when variation is memoryless and carrying resistance incurs a cost to overall fitness. However, under limited fitness-cost conditions explored, cycling performed no better than overkill for preventing resistance.