People and gorillas, horses and duikers and pigs, monkeys and chimps and bats and viruses: We’re all in this together.
R0 explains and, to some limited degree, it predicts. It defines the boundary between a small cluster of weird infections in a tropical village somewhere, flaring up, burning out, and a global pandemi...
Sir Peter Medawar, an eminent British biologist who received a Nobel Prize the same year as Macfarlane Burnet, defined a virus as a piece of bad news wrapped up in a protein.
The fossil record shows that no other species of large-bodied beast—above the size of an ant, say, or of an Antarctic krill—has ever achieved anything like such abundance as the abundance of humans on...
The protein wrap is known as a capsid. The
The term refers to cascading disruptions that can pass between trophic levels—that is, between different categories of interrelated organisms in the hierarchy of energy transfer within an ecosystem.
This elaborate concatenation of life-forms and sequential strategies is highly adaptive and, so far as mosquitoes and hosts are concerned, difficult to resist. It shows evolution’s power, over great l...
Viruses face four basic challenges: how to get from one host to another, how to penetrate a cell within that host, how to commandeer the cell’s equipment and resources for producing multiple copies of...
We know that ecological isolation—either by seawater or by other sorts of delimitation—correlates strongly with risk of extinction
Without explaining what’s on my mind, I ask Nafus and Schreiner: Have they seen any recent invasions by exotic arthropods, or any dramatic population outbreaks among native ones? I inquire about arthr...
Two aspects of a virus in action: transmissibility and virulence. These
Weighing only five grams (about the same as two dimes),
AIDS began with a spillover from one chimp to one human, in southeastern Cameroon, no later than 1908
Among the most important things to remember about evolution—and about its primary mechanism, natural selection, as limned by Darwin and his successors—is that it doesn’t have purposes. It only has res...
An amplifier host is a creature in which a virus or other pathogen replicates—and from which it spews—with extraordinary abundance. Some aspect of the host’s physiology, or its immune system, or its p...
And hopefully nothing will happen. But of course, as she well knew, something always does happen. It’s just a question of what and when.
Each outbreak, by this view, represents a local event primarily explicable by a larger cause—the arrival of the wave. The main proponent of the wave idea is Peter D. Walsh, an American ecologist who h...
Ebola, West Nile, Marburg, the SARS bug, monkeypox, rabies, Machupo, dengue, the yellow fever agent, Nipah, Hendra, Hantaan (the namesake of the hantaviruses, first identified in Korea), chikungunya,...
Ecological disturbance causes diseases to emerge. Shake a tree, and things fall out.
Humanity is a kind of animal, inextricably connected with other animals: in origin and in descent, in sickness and in health.
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