Landscapes of Disease Themed Issue

For the last couple years, I have been writing about a landscape-based approach to the study of infectious disease in general and historic epidemics in particular. When I first wrote about Lambin et al.'s now classic paper "Pathogenic landscapes" nearly three years ago, I did not know then that it would be so influential in...

Private SNAFU learns about Malaria

Malaria was a major risk for American troops during World War II. The US Army enlisted the help of Theodor Geisil, Dr Seuss, to produce educational booklets and pamphlets (discussed here). They also turned to moving pictures to educate the troops.  Private Snafu was featured in a catalog of 26 SNAFU training films based on...

Beyond Germs: Native Depopulation in North America

Beyond Germs: Native Depopulation in North America. Edited by Catherine Cameron, Paul Kelton and Alan Swedlund. University of Arizona Press, 2015. With the number of emerging infectious diseases climbing and new revelations about plague's past, this book is a timely caution to the rhetoric surrounding so-called virgin soil epidemics. This book is the publication of...

Human Parasites of the Roman Empire

Last week photos of Roman toilets were splashed across the web breaking the news that the Romans were not a healthy as most people seem to have assumed. As with many public health interventions, the real value of a sanitation system is out of view (and out of mind) to most people. Its not the...

Summer reading

  The summer is officially over this week so its time for my quarterly reading update. I read a more eclectic mix of topics this summer than usual. These are just those that really stood out as being useful for my purposes. I hope you find something of interest! Books Gregory Aldrete. Floods of the...

Spring Reading

It has been a busy spring. I haven't had a chance to blog as much as I would have liked to, but I have done quite a bit of reading. Some of my reading has been on the complex world of the first plague pandemic. To say that it was transformative would be an understatement....

Plasmodium knowlesi: A New Ancient Malaria Parasite

There are over a hundred different species of the malaria-causing Plasmodium parasites in reptiles, birds and mammals. Being so widespread among terrestrial vertebrates, zoonotic transfer of Plasmodium has come at humans from multiple different sources. Plasmodium knowlesi had been known for some time as a parasite of long-tailed macaques but was not considered a significant human...

Winter Reading

Well since spring is officially here, I guess I'm overdue in posting my winter reading. For being snowed in several weekends this winter, I think I must have done more hibernating than reading/work! My reading seemed to be all over the place and more than usual off-topic to be listed here. I shall try to...

Syndemics and Historic Diseases

I've been looking for a model or framework to bring together interdisciplinary evidence on diseases of the past. There are a variety of disciplinary approaches but few that can readily incorporate very different types of evidence well. Apart from past discussions of discrete co-morbidities, the most common framework for understanding historic disease ecology has been...