  Interactions among multiple infectious agents are increasingly recognized as
a fundamental issue in the understanding of key questions in public health,
regarding pathogen emergence, maintenance, and evolution. The full description
of host-multipathogen systems is however challenged by the multiplicity of
factors affecting the interaction dynamics and the resulting competition that
may occur at different scales, from the within-host scale to the spatial
structure and mobility of the host population. Here we study the dynamics of
two competing pathogens in a structured host population and assess the impact
of the mobility pattern of hosts on the pathogen competition. We model the
spatial structure of the host population in terms of a metapopulation network
and focus on two strains imported locally in the system and having the same
transmission potential but different infectious periods. We find different
scenarios leading to competitive success of either one of the strain or to the
codominance of both strains in the system. The dominance of the strain
characterized by the shorter or longer infectious period depends exclusively on
the structure of the population and on the the mobility of hosts across
patches. The proposed modeling framework allows the integration of other
relevant epidemiological, environmental and demographic factors opening the
path to further mathematical and computational studies of the dynamics of
multipathogen systems.
