User:MrModal/Disease ecology

Disease ecology is a sub-discipline of ecology concerned with the mechanisms, patterns, and effects of host-pathogen interactions, particularly those of infectious diseases, within the context of environmental factors. Disease ecology operates under the assumption that host-pathogen interactions can be conceptually united with other interspecific interactions, such as predation or parasitism. However, it diseases have their place in ecosystems, weeding out the weak to create a healthy system. Outbreaks can have detrimental effects on systems based off of genetic diversity and infection length. The less genetic diversity a population has, the higher the impact of the disease. In some cases, this is good and is a form of natural selection. However, if a small population is trying to rebound and has limited genetic diversity based on being a small community, the disease has the potential to wipe out the entire population. In addition, the longer the infection lasts, the longer it has time to spread and infect even more of the population. The virus also has the potential to mutate and create more strands; this leads to the problem of less of the population to fight off the infection. Diseases affect the entire ecosystem; the food web can be damaged based on a lack of food or the carrier transfering the disease to higher trophic levels. Diseases caused by parasites can be spread through ingestion, a result of predation.

Disease ecologists attempt to understand how outbreaks occur and what actions to take to control the spread. A real-time example is the COVID-19 pandemic; the CDC has put out guidelines to slow the spread, such as masks and social distancing. Scientists have also created a vaccine to protect people fight off the virus easier and lessen the effects.

While the field is often defined within the context of ecology as a whole, disease ecology relates ideas from a wide variety of medical and biological disciplines including immunology, epidemiology, and genetics.