covid | Ecology for the Masses

Tag Archives: covid

Charting the Spread of Disease Ecology

Posted on November 25, 2022 by Adam Hasik Leave a comment

Image Credit: Davian Ho, Maya Peters Kostman, and Philippa Steinberg for the Innovative Genomics Institute, CC BY-NC-SA 4.0, Image Cropped

There’s a certain poetry to the popularity of disease ecology. Once a quirky biological sub-field, the study of diseases in an ecological context had spread steadily in popularity over the last two decades. Then COVID hit, and much like the disease itself, disease ecology rocketed into the forefront of natural sciences.

This wasn’t just contained to university and hospital corridors. Before COVID, how often did you hear words like “transmission”, “virulence” and “pathogen”? While disease ecology is the crux of my professional life now, there’s little chance I would have been able to make a career of it twenty years ago.

To get some perspective, I decided to talk to people who have been there for the surge in relevance disease ecology has experienced in that time. I was recently in Kruger National Park, South Africa for the 4^th International Congress on Parasites of Wildlife, and had the pleasure of sitting down with two prominent disease ecologists, Dr. Sandra Telfer and Dr. Vanessa Ezenwa, in separate meetings to talk about how the field has changed over the course of their careers.

The Forefront

Polly Want A City? Population Boom Sparks Call For Cull Of London’s Invasive Parakeets

Posted on March 2, 2021 by Charlie Woodrow 2 comments

When someone imagines London, they probably visualise Big Ben, Buckingham palace, and an overly patriotic use of the Union Jack. What they probably don’t picture is flocks of bright green parrots occupying every tree branch and streetlamp in view. However, urban populations of invasive parrot species are becoming more readily observed globally, and in London, there are fears the population may be growing too fast!

Earlier this year, the UK saw headlines announcing that the government has been advised to cull the iconic birds following a recent increase in numbers. But with their bright colours making them a unique addition to the fauna of the city, and their nonchalant nature towards locals and tourists, many are opposed to the cull. So what is the right thing to do when we get attached to an invasive species? And are parrots on their way to becoming the next globally distributed ‘pest’?

Opinions

From Deforestation to the Pandemic: How Destroying Ecosystems Increases Novel Infectious Diseases

Posted on February 18, 2021 by Sam Perrin One comment

This is a guest post by Professor Emma Despland

Zoonotic diseases, or diseases that jump from animals to people, are not a new phenomenon. Many well-known human diseases first originated in animal populations. In some cases, animals are the main sources of human infection and human-to-human transmission is rare or null (e.g. rabies); other diseases persist in animal populations and occasionally jump to humans, seeding a human outbreak (e.g. plague), and yet others jumped from animals to people long ago and have been circulating in human populations ever since (e.g. measles). However, novel zoonotics have been appearing with disturbingly increasing frequency.