  Yet often neglected, dynamical interdependencies between concomitant
contagion processes can alter their intrinsic equilibria and bifurcations. A
particular case of interest for disease control is the emergence of explosive
transitions in epidemic dynamics coming from their interactions with other
simultaneous processes. To address this problem, here we propose a framework
coupling a standard epidemic dynamics with another contagion process,
presenting a tunable parameter shaping the nature of its transitions. Our model
retrieves well-known results in the literature, such as the existence of
first-order transitions arising from the mutual cooperation of epidemics or the
onset of explosive transitions when social contagions unidirectionally drive
epidemics. We also reveal that negative feedback loops between simultaneous
dynamical processes might suppress explosive phenomena, thus increasing systems
robustness against external perturbations. Our results render a general
perspective towards finding different pathways to explosive phenomena from the
interaction of contagion processes.
