The Ecology of Disease

Sunday, October 21, 2012
Robbins, Jim. "The Ecology of Disease." The New York Times. The New York Times,  July 2012. Web.     21 Oct. 2012.
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/15/sunday-review/the-ecology-of-disease.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0

Summary: The article explains the close ties of everything in an ecosystem and describes how the change in a habitat can effect a species, and in turn, effect humans. The article explains a case in which a disease in fruit bats spread to humans. They eat fruits hanging upside down and then spit out the seeds. These bats carry a disease that they have adapted to called henipah, and when a seed dropped into a piggery, the virus amplified within the pigs and then spread to humans, causing a massive outbreak of this disease in Malaysia. Other cases like this have happened throughout time, and scientists are working to find the underlying cause. The article goes on to explain the importance of  protective species, species that work in the environment so "serve a protective role." When humans change an environment by, for example, chopping down trees, we ruin the biodiversity and take away species that protect other species. For example, when trees were chopped in the amazon, malaria went up almost 50 percent, because mosquitoes thrive in a specific mix of light and water that is given off in recently deforested areas. The article continues to express the need for understanding how our everyday action affect everything else, and also how scientists are working every day to find out more about these connections within ecosystems and decrease cases of diseases.

Relevance: We learned about ecosystems in school and how all factors in an ecosystem, abiotic and biotic, depend so much on each other. The article emphasizes this idea by explaining how a small change in an environment, like a a reduction of trees, can cause one animal to thrive, which in turn, makes it much more likely for humans to be affected by a disease that the animal, in this case mosquito, carries. Just like the disappearance of trees led to an increase in mosquitoes and an outburst in disease, we learned that an increase in trees and acorns lead to an increase in mice, which makes it more accessible for ticks to transmit Lyme disease, resulting in an outburst in Lyme disease.