Data for: Can pharmaceutical pollution alter the spread of infectious disease? A case study using fluoxetine.

Human activity is changing global environments at an unprecedented rate, imposing new ecological and evolutionary ramifications on wildlife dynamics, including host-parasite interactions. Here we investigate how an emerging concern of modern human activity, pharmaceutical pollution, influences the spread of disease in a population, using the water flea Daphnia magna and the bacterial pathogen Pasteuria ramosa as a model system. We found that exposure to different concentrations of fluoxetine—a widely prescribed psychoactive drug and widespread contaminant of aquatic ecosystems—affected the severity of disease experienced by an individual in a non-monotonic manner. The direction and magnitude of any effect, however, varied with both the infection outcome measured, as well as the genotype of the pathogen. In contrast, the characteristics of unexposed animals, and thus the growth and density of susceptible hosts, were robust to fluoxetine. Using our data to parameterise an epidemiology mod..., ,