Anti-malaria pinup calendar

The radio show All Things Considered on NPR recently had a segment on How The U.S. Stopped Malaria, One Cartoon At A Time
You can listen to it at the link or read the transcript and see some awesome images.

 (T)he U.S. Army was working hard to eliminate the parasite on military bases and among the troops. They broadcasted anti-malaria jingles on the Armed Forces Radio and distributed cartoons and "pinup calendars" encouraging troops to cover up and use repellent.

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.