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Evolutionary epidemiology consists in simultaneously analysing how parasites spread and evolve. [1]
An epidemic is the rapid spread of disease to a large number of people in a given population within a short period of time. For example, in meningococcal infections, an attack rate in excess of 15 cases per 100,000 people for two consecutive weeks is considered an epidemic.
Epidemiology is the study and analysis of the distribution, patterns and determinants of health and disease conditions in defined populations.
In epidemiology, an outbreak is a sudden increase in occurrences of a disease in a particular time and place. It may affect a small and localized group or impact upon thousands of people across an entire continent. Four linked cases of a rare infectious disease may be sufficient to constitute an outbreak. Outbreaks include epidemics, which term is normally only used for infectious diseases, as well as diseases with an environmental origin, such as a water or foodborne disease. They may affect a region in a country or a group of countries. Pandemics are near-global disease outbreaks when multiple countries across the world are infected.
The Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine (LSTM) is a higher education institution with degree awarding powers and registered charity located in Liverpool, United Kingdom. Established in 1898, it was the first institution in the world dedicated to research and teaching in tropical medicine. The school has a research portfolio of over £220 million, assisted by funding from organisations such as the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, Wellcome Trust and Department for International Development (DFID).
Travel medicine or emporiatrics is the branch of medicine that deals with the prevention and management of health problems of international travelers.
Evolutionary medicine or Darwinian medicine is the application of modern evolutionary theory to understanding health and disease. Modern medical research and practice have focused on the molecular and physiological mechanisms underlying health and disease, while evolutionary medicine focuses on the question of why evolution has shaped these mechanisms in ways that may leave us susceptible to disease. The evolutionary approach has driven important advances in our understanding of cancer, autoimmune disease, and anatomy. Medical schools have been slower to integrate evolutionary approaches because of limitations on what can be added to existing medical curricula.
Health geography is the application of geographical information, perspectives, and methods to the study of health, disease, and health care.
Randolph M. Nesse is an American physician, scientist and author who is notable for his role as a founder of the field of evolutionary medicine. He is professor of life sciences and ASU Foundation Professor at Arizona State University, where he became the Founding Director of the Center for Evolution and Medicine in 2014. He was previously a professor of psychiatry, professor of psychology and research professor at the University of Michigan where he led the Evolution and Human Adaptation Program and helped to establish one of the world’s first anxiety disorders clinics and conducted research on neuroendocrine responses to fear.
Mycobacterium africanum is a species of Mycobacterium that is most commonly found in West African countries, where it is estimated to cause up to 40% of pulmonary tuberculosis. The symptoms of infection resemble those of M. tuberculosis.
Molecular pathology is an emerging discipline within pathology which is focused in the study and diagnosis of disease through the examination of molecules within organs, tissues or bodily fluids. Molecular pathology shares some aspects of practice with both anatomic pathology and clinical pathology, molecular biology, biochemistry, proteomics and genetics, and is sometimes considered a "crossover" discipline. It is multi-disciplinary in nature and focuses mainly on the sub-microscopic aspects of disease. A key consideration is that more accurate diagnosis is possible when the diagnosis is based on both the morphologic changes in tissues and on molecular testing.
In epidemiology, a disease vector is any agent which carries and transmits an infectious pathogen into another living organism; agents regarded as vectors are organisms, such as intermediate parasites or microbes.
Evolution of Infectious Disease is a 1993 book by the evolutionary biologist Paul W. Ewald. In this book Ewald contests the traditional view that parasites should evolve toward benign coexistence with their hosts. He draws on various studies which contradict this dogma and asserts his own theory that is based on fundamental evolutionary principles. This book provides one of the first in-depth presentations of insights from evolutionary biology on various fields in health science, including epidemiology and medicine.
Genetic epidemiology is the study of the role of genetic factors in determining health and disease in families and in populations, and the interplay of such genetic factors with environmental factors. Genetic epidemiology seeks to derive a statistical and quantitative analysis of how genetics work in large groups.
Dr. Michael T. McGuire (1929-2016) was an American psychiatrist who has made contributions to the theory of psychoanalysis, biological psychiatry, evolutionary biology, sociobiology and the theory and practice of psychiatry.
Lloyd A. Demetrius is a mathematician and theoretical biologist at the Max Planck Institute for Molecular Genetics at Berlin, Germany, and the Department of Organismic and Evolutionary biology, Harvard University. He is best known for the discovery of the concept, evolutionary entropy, a statistical parameter that characterizes Darwinian fitness in models of evolutionary processes at various levels of biological organization - molecular, organismic and cultural. Evolutionary entropy, an analogue of the Gibbs-Boltzmann entropy in statistical physics, is the cornerstone of directionality theory, an analytical study of evolution by variation and selection. The theory has applications to: a) the development of aging and the evolution of longevity; b) the origin and progression of age related diseases such as cancer, and neurodegenerative disorders such as Alzheimer's disease and Parkinson's disease; c) the evolution of cooperation and the spread of inequality.
Universal Darwinism refers to a variety of approaches that extend the theory of Darwinism beyond its original domain of biological evolution on Earth. Universal Darwinism aims to formulate a generalized version of the mechanisms of variation, selection and heredity proposed by Charles Darwin, so that they can apply to explain evolution in a wide variety of other domains, including psychology, economics, culture, medicine, computer science and physics.
Betsy Foxman is an epidemiologist at the University of Michigan since 1984, where she is director of the Center for Molecular and Clinical Epidemiology of Infectious Diseases, and of the Interdisciplinary Training Program in Infectious Diseases. She also served as Editor-in-Chief of the journal Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Infectious Diseases, is a member of the Infectious Disease Society of America and of the American College of Epidemiology.
Network medicine is the application of network science towards identifying, preventing, and treating diseases. This field focuses on using network topology and network dynamics towards identifying diseases and developing medical drugs. Biological networks, such as protein-protein interactions and metabolic pathways, are utilized by network medicine. Disease networks, which map relationships between diseases and biological factors, also play an important role in the field. Epidemiology is extensively studied using network science as well; social networks and transportation networks are used to model the spreading of disease across populations. Network medicine is a medically focused area of systems biology. A gentle introduction to the field can be found here: https://web.uniroma1.it/stitch/node/5613.
Alison P. Galvani is an American epidemiologist. She is the Burnett and Stender Families Professor of Epidemiology at the Yale School of Public Health and the Director of the Center for Infectious Disease Modeling and Analysis.
John Brownstein is a Canadian epidemiologist and Professor of Medicine at the Harvard Medical School as well as the Chief Innovation Officer at Boston Children’s Hospital. His research focuses on development of computational methods in epidemiology for applications to public health also known as computational epidemiology or e-epidemiology He is also the founder of several global public health surveillance systems including HealthMap. He is most known for his work on global tracking of disease outbreaks.
Darwinian medicine and evolutionary epidemiology are complementary in several ways. Whereas evolutionary epidemiology focuses on the spread of diseases, Darwinian medicine focuses more on the individual patient. Darwinian medicine ...
