About

This blog was first created in support of a new book. To be published by Springer in March 2009, Farming Human Pathogens: Ecological Resilience and Evolutionary Process applies information theory to the evolution and emergence of human pathogens. Specifically, within an information formalism we describe how punctuated shifts in mesoscale ecosystems can entrain patterns of gene expression and pathogen evolution.

The development is applied to several infectious diseases that have evolved in response to the world as humans have made it. Many pathogens emerging from underneath epidemiological control are ‘farmed’ in the metaphorical sense, as the evolution of drug resistant HIV makes clear, but some, like avian influenza, emerge quite literally as the result of new practices in industrial farming. In that context, effective disease control necessarily involves broad economic and social reform for reasons embedded in the very basics of pathogen evolution.

We’ll address here these and other ideas introduced in the book, but will also write about the social dynamics of pathogen evolution and spread as they arise in the day-to-day.