Blowback: new formal perspectives on agriculturally driven pathogen evolution and spread

By their diversity in time, space, and mode, traditional and conservation agricultures can create barriers limiting pathogen evolution and spread analogous to a sterilizing temperature. Large-scale monocropping and confined animal feeding-lot operations remove such barriers, resulting, above agroeco...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Epidemiology and infection 2015-07, Vol.143 (10), p.2068-2080
Main Authors: WALLACE, R., WALLACE, R. G.
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Animals
Communicable Diseases - epidemiology
Communicable Diseases - transmission
Disease Transmission, Infectious
Economics
Ecosystem
Equilibrium
Evolution
Gene expression
Global Health
Humans
Information sources
Models, Statistical
Original Papers
Pathogens
Sociological Factors
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Summary:By their diversity in time, space, and mode, traditional and conservation agricultures can create barriers limiting pathogen evolution and spread analogous to a sterilizing temperature. Large-scale monocropping and confined animal feeding-lot operations remove such barriers, resulting, above agroecologically specific thresholds, in the development and wide propagation of novel disease strains. We apply a newly developed class of necessary-conditions statistical models of evolutionary process, first using the theory on an evolutionarily stable viral pathogen vulnerable to vaccine treatment: post-World War II poliomyelitis emerged in the UK and USA from sudden widespread adoption of automobile ownership and usage. We then examine an evolutionarily variable pathogen, swine influenza in North America. The model suggests epidemiological blowback from globalizing intensive husbandry and the raising and shipping of monoculture livestock across increasing expanses, is likely to be far more consequential, driving viral selection for greater virulence and lowered response to biomedical intervention.
ISSN:0950-2688
1469-4409
1469-4409
DOI:10.1017/S0950268814000077