Farming Human Pathogens

Download or read book Farming Human Pathogens written by Rodrick Wallace and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2009-06-12 with total page 220 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Farming Human Pathogens: Ecological Resilience and Evolutionary Process introduces a cutting-edge mathematical 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 authors apply the new formalism toward characterizing a number of infectious diseases that have evolved in response to the world as humans have made it. Many of the human pathogens that are emerging out from underneath epidemiological control are 'farmed' in the metaphorical sense, as the evolution of drug-resistant HIV makes clear, but also quite literally, as demonstrated by avian influenza's emergence from poultry farms in southern China. The most successful pathogens appear able to integrate selection pressures humans have imposed upon them from a variety of socioecological scales. The book also presents a related treatment of Eigen's Paradox and the RNA 'error catastrophe' that bedevils models of the origins of viruses and of biological life itself.