Liza Lester Sep 21, 2012 No Comments
by Liza Lester, ESA communications officer The pressures of global trade may heighten disease incidence by dictating changes in land use. A boom in disease-carrying ticks and chiggers has followed the abandonment of rice cultivation in Taiwanese paddies, say ecologist Chi-Chien Kuo and colleagues, demonstrating the potential for global commodities pricing to drive the spread [...]
Read more...Liza Lester Nov 8, 2011 No Comments
This post contributed by Liza Lester, ESA communications officer No one speaks for the endangered poliomyelitis. No one raises money to protect the last survivors, as health workers stalk the virus through its last redoubts in India, Pakistan, Nigeria and Afghanistan. On the contrary, the WHO spends billions on hunting it to extinction. But [...]
Read more...The United States “war on terrorism” mobilized the federal government to take action to prevent a recurrence of the events of 9/11/01. Ten years and just over a month later, efforts that span two presidential administrations have led to a country that is more secure against one of Earth’s most dangerous species: humans. Unfortunately, an [...]
Read more...Terence Houston Sep 29, 2011 No Comments
Recent blockbuster films, including “Rise of the Planet of the Apes” and “Contagion” have featured zoonotic diseases that spread into (spoiler alert) deadly pandemics. If the respective films didn’t give you a case of hypochondria, statistics collected by the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) will: Approximately 75 percent of recently emerging infectious diseases affecting humans [...]
Read more...This post contributed by Lindsay Deel, a Ph.D. student in geography at West Virginia University and Intern with ESA’s journal Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment Infectious diseases won’t know what hit them. A massive new collaborative effort between funding sources in the United States (US) and United Kingdom (UK) takes aim at infectious diseases [...]
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