The Ecology of Disease

I only discovered today that the Ecological Society of America has a series of monthly podcasts. In the October 10th 2008 issue Dr Raina Plowright explores the relationship between ecological change and disease emergence. This episode is based on a paper in the October issue of Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment entitled “Causal inference in disease ecology: investigating ecological drivers of disease emergence” and discusses some of the difficulties in definitively linking environmental changes with the emergence of diseases in cause-and-effect relationships.

We will be talking about these topics in week 3 but I thought this interview gave a nice sense of what scientists actually do, and some of the advantages, and difficulties, of taking an interdisciplinary approach.