Publications

Summary by: Kailah Massey Corresponding Authors: Michael C. Wimberly mcwimberly@ou.edu, Courtney C. Murdock ccm256@cornell.edu             Arboviruses, viruses that are transmitted through insect vectors such as mosquitoes, present a huge threat to human health. Environmental factors such as temperature, precipitation, and humidity intensely affect mosquito population […]

Summary by: Kailah Massey Corresponding Authors: Robert Richards, robert.richards@uga.edu The Guinea worm parasite,  Dracunculus medinensis, is on the verge of eradication – an uncommon feat – but recent outbreaks linked to domestic dogs have presented challenges to eradication efforts. D. medinensis causes dracunculiasis, which, while rarely lethal, can be intensely […]

Corresponding Author: Matthew Bonds Summary provided by Michelle Evans In the early months of the global COVID-19 pandemic, models predicted that countries in Sub-saharan Africa (SSA) would experience some of the highest burdens of COVID-19. It was expected that the same drivers of other infectious diseases (e.g. socio-economic conditions, lack […]

Summary by Kailah Massey Corresponding authors: Vanessa Ezenwa, vezenwa@uga.edu Seasonal changes in rainfall, temperature, and the amount of food available, are known to affect parasitism in host populations. Rainfall in particular has been shown to have a strong effect on helminths, parasitic worms that can cause weakness or disease in […]

A variety of generic indicators have been proposed to identify gradual changes in a population that can be used to anticipate the onset or conclusion of an epidemic.  Many of these indicators rely on critical slowing down, a phenomenon where a system takes a longer time to return to a […]

Seasonal migration shapes when and where animals are infected with pathogens, but physiological costs associated with migration can also cause latent infections to reactivate (“migratory relapse”). We develop a mathematical model to explore how migratory relapse influences peak infection risk and its seasonal timing. We show that relapse can amplify […]

Understanding what prevents or enables the evolution of resistance to disease is critical for both understanding the natural world and also managing many modern societal problems, from agriculture to medicine. In previous work, we had shown, for what we believe to be the first time in an animal, that a […]

Understanding biodiversity patterns over space and time requires using data collected across large scales. One way to collect these data is to compile databases of multiple independent studies. However, compiled databases often magnify problems with sampling bias, where some taxa, geographic regions, and ecological questions have been studied far more […]

Corresponding Author: Elizabeth Warburton, ewarburton@uga.edu   Although drylands comprise over 41% of Earth’s surface, their parasite fauna remains understudied. This is a critical oversight as desert parasite communities are exemplars within the extremes of parasite ecology and thus readily lend themselves to testing hypotheses of virulence evolution, host specialization, and […]

Diarrheal disease (DD) is responsible for over 700,000 child deaths annually and, in Madagascar, is the most common cause of death across all ages. Because the pathogens that cause DD are environmentally transmitted, spatial patterns in the burden of disease are thought to be strongly related to spatial patterns in […]