Abstract
The study of pathogens is a keystone of considerable progress for Public Health in the last decades. Nowadays, a promising field of study are interactions between pathogens circulating in the same populations. Indeed, just as any living species, a pathogen is part of an ecosystem, and within this ecosystem it interacts with numerous things, including other pathogens. In this PhD thesis we have been interested in the consequences of such interactions at several scales. Firstly a wide bibliographic work has been accomplish in order to identify known and documented interactions. From this work we propose several categories of interactions and point out the gaps in this literature. Then we explored the potential consequences on population of several interactions described in the first part, and tested promising methods to detect such interaction from population-scale data. Lastly we focused on the specific example of dengue, where four strongly interacting serotypes and current vaccine developments rise the issue of the interference between interactions and Public Health policies. A broader vision of pathogens dynamics rises from the embedding of pathogens into a community, and this vision could benefit from progress in statistical methods and theoretical models.