Disrupting a delicate balance: Emerging pathogens in a changing world

‘Emerging’ pathogens are defined as infectious agents with increasing incidence that are expanding into new host populations in response to ecological or epidemiological change. Over 20% of emerging pathogens are vector-borne, meaning transmitted by arthropod vectors, and over 60% of emerging pathogens are zoonotic, meaning derived from animal (often wildlife) reservoirs. Broadly, the Brook lab investigates the impacts of climate change, demographic change, and land use change on host-pathogen interactions. In this seminar, we first explore how rising global temperatures and elevated precipitation interact with human demography to synchronize dengue dynamics into explosive epidemics throughout the past two decades in Cambodia. We next interrogate our eleven-year longitudinal field study to describe how seasonality and land use shape the persistence and transmission of bat-borne viruses in Madagascar. As a result of a long coevolutionary history, bats demonstrate minimal clinical disease from infection with viruses known to cause extreme pathology following spillover to other mammals. However, the past three decades have witnessed countless perturbations to the delicate balance of bat-virus symbiosis across the globe, resulting in unprecedented rates of bat virus emergence into novel hosts, including humans. From Southeast Asia to Africa, we investigate the impact of environmental disturbance on emerging pathogen dynamics in some of the world’s most vulnerable human and wildlife populations.

Speaker: Cara Brook, University of Chicago