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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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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A mutant strain of the wheat stem rust fungus, Puccinia graminis f. sp. tritici, has emerged that threatens as much as 60 million tons of world wheat production.  The story of this emergence can be found here.  There is a clearinghouse of information on the Borlaug Global Rust Initiative website. The emergence of such a [...]

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The coming Aporkalypse appears to have faded into last week’s obscurity. With WHO raising the pandemic alert from 3 to 5 in the span of about 24 hours, it seemed that Oinkmageddon was upon us.  But now it’s hard to find a news piece on swine flu, let alone an inflammatory one. This is something [...]

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A news story reports the outbreak of abalone viral ganglioneuritis in Tasmania.  This is the first report of the disease in Tasmanian fisheries.  In fact, the disease appears to be quite newly emergent since, according to the Department of Primary Industries for the State of Victoria, the virus was previously not described in Australia prior to 2005.  Since [...]

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