monkey's uncle

I am recently back from the Ecology and Evolution of Infectious Disease (EEID) Principal Investigators’ Meeting hosted by the Odum School of Ecology at the University of Georgia in lovely Athens. This is a remarable event, and a remarkable field, and I can’t remember ever being so energized after returning from a professional conference (which [...]

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A new paper written by Dan Salkeld (formerly of Stanford), Kerry Padgett (CA Department of Public Health), and myself just came out in the journal Ecology Letters this week. One of the most important ideas in disease ecology is a hypothesis known as the “dilution effect”. The basic idea behind the dilution effect hypothesis is [...]

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This past week, The Lancet published a brief commentary I wrote with a group of anthropologist-collaborators. The piece, written with Craig Janes, Kitty Corbett, and Jim Trostle, arose from a workshop I attended in lovely Buenos Aires back in June of 2011. This was a pretty remarkable meeting that was orchestrated by Josh Rosenthal, acting [...]

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Biological and Human Dimensions of Primate Retroviral Transmission One of the great enduring mysteries in disease ecology is the timing of the AIDS pandemic. AIDS emerged as a clinical entity in the late 1970s, but HIV-1, the retrovirus that causes pandemic AIDS, entered the human population from wild primates many decades earlier, probably near the [...]

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It isn’t every day that we learn about the discovery of an entirely new vector for an important vector-borne disease. A new report by the Australian Department of Agriculture and Fisheries has identified a new species of Leishmania that is transmitted by midges, not the usual vector, sandflies. Leishmania is a vector-borne protozoan parasite that [...]

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I am happy to report that our paper describing the measurement of casual contacts within an American high school is finally out in the early edition of PNAS. Stanford’s great social science reporter, Adam Gorlick, has written a very nice overview of our paper for the Stanford Report (also here in the LA Times and [...]

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I was thrilled to hear Dan Salkeld‘s excellent (and long!) radio interview on Colorado Public Radio about our recent paper on understanding plague epizootics in prairie dogs.  There is a remarkable amount of information contained in this interview.  If you want to learn about plague ecology, then this is an excellent introduction.

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We have a new paper in the Early Edition of PNAS on the ecology of plague in prairie dogs. The Stanford News Service did a nice little write-up of the paper (and Mark Shwartz’s full version is available on the Woods Institute site) and it has now been picked up by a number of media [...]

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Where Does Bluetongue Virus Sleep in the Winter?  It’s actually a very interesting question in disease ecology.  Where do infectious agents hide when the conditions are not right for transmission?

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A very sad story appeared on PROMED-mail recently about a die-off of elephants around Nakabolelwa, Namibia.  While still not completely investigated, the most likely cause seems to be anthrax.  Bad news for elephant conservation. If anthrax infection turns out truly to be the cause of mortality, then it raises all sorts of problems.  Chief among [...]

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