A Stratified Worm Burden Framework for Endemic Equilibria, Demography, and Mass Drug Administration: Linking Classical Macroparasite Models to Transmission Dynamics

Background. Classical macroparasite models commonly represent worm burden heterogeneity through prescribed Poisson or negative-binomial (NB) distributions, while transmission dynamics are formulated in terms of aggregate quantities such as mean worm burden and prevalence. We revisit these assumptions using a stratified worm burden (SWB) framework that explicitly tracks the distribution of parasite burdens across heterogeneous host classes and allows demographic turnover, transmission, and interventions to be analyzed within a unified model. Methods. We derive equilibrium distributions of the S

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