Do Pathogens Time Travel?

Evolution arises from a wealth of failure: 1) natural selection requires large and variable populations comprised largely of organisms that fail because their designs do not match their present circumstances and 2) chance destruction occurs at all spatiotemporal scales.

So clearly strict optimization does not reside in the designs, contra religiosos and radical adaptationists alike. Nor does it reside in the process of selection: every species eventually dies out–by maladaptation, stochastic extirpation or an external force (say, a large meteorite in yo’ face).

And yet biological life began early on Earth and continues on, four billion years later, and will do so after the present climate state collapses or we nuke ourselves senseless.

The Agro-Industrial Roots of Swine Flu H1N1

Mexico appears ground zero for an outbreak of deadly human-specific H1N1.

Of the over 1400 people that have been reportedly infected there so far, 86 have died. Short chains of transmission of the virus have also been reported in California, Texas, Kansas, Ohio, New York City, Canada and New Zealand. The virus has been identified as a new recombinant of influenza A (H1N1).

The World Health Organization has labeled the new strain potentially pandemic and the US has declared a public health emergency. Of great concern, and perhaps a marker of the seriousness of the outbreak, the deaths in Mexico, as in pandemics of eras past, appear concentrated among the young and healthy. In contrast, the mortality associated with most seasonal influenzas falls heaviest upon infants and the elderly.

Researchers have over the past several years hypothesized that a healthy and responsive immune system may explain the greater mortality among patients 20-40 years infected with highly pathogenic influenza.

New Book Models the Emergence of Human Pathogens

Farming Human Pathogens: Ecological Resilience and Evolutionary Process introduces a cutting-edge formalism based on the asymptotic limit theorems of information theory to describe how punctuated shifts in mesoscale ecosystems can entrain patterns of gene expression and organismal 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. Effective disease control in the 21st Century must necessarily involve broad economic and social reform for reasons embedded in the basics of pathogen evolution.

The book is aimed at graduate students and researchers working in computational biology and mathematical modeling of biological processes, public health professionals and academic scientists working in public health and medical geography, and mathematically trained evolutionary biologists and ecologists, particularly those concerned with human pathogens.

Farming Human Pathogens will be released by Springer in March 2009.