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8.12.2020 | „People, pathogens, places: where medical geography meets disease ecology?”

The pandemic of Covid-19 has brought home the dangers posed by so-called emerging infectious diseases (EIDs) and the importance of embracing “one health” perspectives. In an era of increased global connectivity, growing urban and extra-urban populations and changing land-used patterns, we are told, epidemics and pandemics due to novel zoonoses spilling over into human populations are to be expected. But where did this modern ecological understanding of infectious disease come from, and how does it relate to older understandings of the genesis of pandemics and earlier scientific traditions, such as medical ecology and medical geography?

In this talk, I briefly revisit the writings of three pioneers of disease ecology – the bacteriologist Charles Nicolle, the geographer Jacques May and the microbiologist René Dubos – and briefly trace their influence on other key thinkers in this emergent field, such as Steven Morse and Joshua Lederberg.

Whether or not the ideas of these early disease ecologists were couched in explicitly ecological language, I argue they all shared a vision of disease as the result of the disturbances of “natural” equilibrium states and a phenomenon that could not be understood apart from the environment and the places where people and pathogens interacted. However, while this led some thinkers to embrace modern evolutionary perspectives and to draw a sharper boundary between medical geography and disease ecology, others emphasized the importance of place and environment over long evolutionary timescales and insisted on the fields being continuous with one another.

Vortragender: Mark Honigsbaum (London)

Kommentar: Jonathan Everts (Halle)

Moderation: Simon Runkel (Jena)

Details Zugang Zoom: https://www.wigeo.uni-bayreuth.de/.../geograph.../index.html