We modelled how stress affects the population dynamics of infectious disease. We were specifically concerned with stress that increased susceptibility of uninfected hosts when exposed to infection. If such stresses also reduced resources, fecundity and/or survivorship, there was a reduction in the host carrying capacity. This lowered the contact between infected and uninfected hosts, thereby decreasing transmission. In addition, stress that increased parasite mortality decreased disease. The opposing effects of stress on disease dynamics made it difficult to predict the response of disease to environmental stress. We found analytical solutions with negative, positive, convex and concave associations between disease and stress. Numerical simulations with randomly generated parameter values suggested that the impact of host-specific diseases generally declined with stress while the impact of non-specific (or open) diseases increased with stress. These results help clarify predictions about the interaction between environmental stress and disease in natural populations.

Predator control programmes are generally implemented in an attempt to increase prey population sizes. However, predator removal could prove harmful to prey populations that are regulated primarily by parasitic infections rather than by predation. We develop models for microparasitic and macroparasitic infection that specify the conditions where predator removal will (a) increase the incidence of parasitic infection, (b) reduce the number of healthy individuals in the prey population and (c) decrease the overall size of the prey population. In general, predator removal is more likely to be harmful when the parasite is highly virulent, macroparasites are highly aggregated in their prey, hosts are long-lived and the predators select infected prey.