She is one of this new breed of cross-trained disease specialists I’ve mentioned, veterinarian-ecologists who recognize the intimate connectedness of human health, wildlife health, livestock health, a...
RNA viruses are limited to small genomes because their mutation rates are so high, and their mutation rates are so high because they’re limited to small genomes. In fact, there’s a fancy name for that...
People and gorillas, horses and duikers and pigs, monkeys and chimps and bats and viruses: We’re all in this together.
Others are new and inexplicably sporadic, claiming a few victims (as Hendra does) or a few hundred (Ebola) in this place or that, and then disappearing for years.
One animal died and, after it tested positive for Reston virus, forty-nine others housed in the same room were euthanized as a precaution. (Most of those, tested posthumously, were negative.) Ten empl...
Numbers can be an important aspect of understanding infectious disease. Take measles. At first glance, it might seem nonmathematical. It’s caused by a paramyxovirus
Now here’s the part that, as it percolates into your brain, should cause a shudder: Scientists think that each of those twelve groups (eight of HIV-2, four of HIV-1) reflects an independent instance o...
Not only are islands impoverished relative to the mainlands, but small islands are more severely impoverished than large ones. That bit of insight became famed as the species-area relationship.
It comes and it goes. But epidemiologists have recognized that, with measles virus, as with other pathogens, there’s a critical minimum size of the host population, below which it can’t persist indefi...
In ecological terms, we are almost paradoxical: large-bodied and long-lived but grotesquely abundant. We are an outbreak.
Horses aren’t native to Australia. They are exotic, first brought there by European settlers barely more than two centuries ago. Hendra is probably an old virus, according to the runic evidence of its...
Ecological disturbance causes diseases to emerge. Shake a tree, and things fall out.
Continuation of the outbreak depended on the likelihood of encounters between people who were infectious and people who could be infected. This idea became known as the mass action principle. It was a...
But here's a bit of spoilsport historical reality: It wasn't the finches that inspired Darwin, it was the Mockingbirds.
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...
AIDS began with a spillover from one chimp to one human, in southeastern Cameroon, no later than 1908
A few patients do bleed to death, Rollin said, but they don’t explode, and they don’t melt. In fact, he said, the conventional term then in use, Ebola hemorrhagic fever, was itself a misnomer, because...
A mutation in that strain might have made it especially aggressive, efficient, transmissible, and fierce.
Mad cow disease is caused by a prion, a weirdly folded protein molecule that triggers weird folding in other molecules, like Kurt Vonnegut’s infectious form of water, ice-nine, in his great early nove...
If the virus had arrived in a different sort of big city—more loosely governed, full of poor people, lacking first-rate medical institutions—it might have escaped containment and burned through a