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Pandora’s box of pathogens

Community ecologists work to predict emerging disease threats

Sharon Collinge, of the University of Colorado--Boulder, believes that a primary goal of community ecologists should be to predict the disease ramifications of human alterations to the environment.

"Although we've studied community interactions such as a community of parasites infecting a single host, we have not devoted as much effort to addressing additional complications, such as sequential host species that interact on different trophic levels," explains Collinge.

Collinge, together with Chris Ray, also of UC--Boulder, have organized a symposium, "Emerging Diseases: Stressing the Union of Community Ecology and Epidemiology," which will be held during the Ecological Society of America's Annual Meeting in Savannah, Georgia. One of the chief goals of their symposium, say the organizers, is to stimulate the development of 'community epidemiology' as a sub-discipline of ecology.

Collinge and Ray have assembled a panel of speakers, who will each highlight cases where human activities appear to be influencing the prevalence and movement of diseases, including:

• Andrew Dobson, of Princeton University, drawing from examples of pathogens of carnivores in the Serengeti and of birds in Hawaii, will highlight pathogens that move between wild hosts and domestic hosts, as well as from domestic/wild hosts to humans.

• Eliska Rejmankova, of the University of California--Davis, will describe her research team's hypothesis that nutrient-enriched runoff from agricultural lands and human settlements in Belize, Central America, leads to more productive marsh habitat for a particular species of mosquito. Anopheles vestitipennis is a more efficient malaria vector than another type of mosquito which does not fare as well with this land use change. As a result, this development can be expected to lead to a higher malaria risk for people living in proximity to the impacted marshes.

• Thomas Unnasch, of the University of Alabama--Birmingham, will discuss research undertaken in 2001 during outbreaks of Eastern Equine encephalomyelitis and West Nile Virus which, taken together, seem to suggest that forest fragmentation and increases in the populations of the Brown-headed Cowbird may increase the potential for future outbreaks.

• Focusing on the Henipavirus outbreaks that emerged in Australia and Malaysia in the 1990s, Peter Dazak, of the Consortium for Conservation Medicine, will explore how recent changes in land use, climate, and bat migration may have driven the deadly outbreaks. In particular, Dazak's work will highlight the double impact some human activities may be causing: reducing available wildlife habitat and increasing transmission of microbes between species.

Other speakers include symposium co-organizer Chris Ray, Robert Holt of the University of Florida--Gainesville, Richard Ostfeld, of the Institute of Ecosystem Studies, and Charles Mitchell of Cornell University.

For more information on this event, or to find out more about the Ecological Society of America's 88th Annual Meeting, please visit our website http://www.esa.org/Savannah. Held at the Savannah International Trade and Convention Center August 3-8, 2003, in historic Savannah, Georgia, these sessions are part of a gathering of over 3,000 scientists and researchers. The theme of the meeting, "Uplands to Lowlands: Coastal Processes in a Time of Global Change," highlights the challenges facing ecological scientists, modelers, and policy makers.

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