Andrew P. Dobson

TL;DR: Tanzania's iconic national park must not be divided by a highway, say Andrew Dobson, Markus Borner, Tony Sinclair and 24 others.

TL;DR: How essential aspects of relevant epidemiological considerations may be included into models of fisheries are indicated by how simple models discussed here can be extended to include other factors which can be important in determining management strategies for fisheries where parasites and disease are an important consideration.

TL;DR: It is demonstrated that vector and reservoir species richness can explain per se most of the pathogen transmission observed for West Nile virus in different parts of the United States, giving empirical support for the validity of these opposing theoretically predicted effects.

TL;DR: Vector-borne and parasitic diseases are drivers of the latitudinal gradient in income, and the burden of these diseases is predicted to rise as biodiversity falls.

Abstract: The next generation of climate-driven, disease prediction models will most likely require a mechanistically based, dynamical framework that parameterizes key processes at a variety of locations. Over the next two decades, consensus climate predictions make it possible to produce forecasts for a number of important infectious diseases that are largely independent of the uncertainty of longer-term emissions scenarios. In particular, the role of climate in the modulation of seasonal disease transmission needs to be unravelled from the complex dynamics resulting from the interaction of transmission with herd immunity and intervention measures that depend upon previous burdens of infection. Progress is also needed to solve the mismatch between climate projections and disease projections at the scale of public health interventions. In the time horizon of seasons to years, early warning systems should benefit from current developments on multi-model ensemble climate prediction systems, particularly in areas where high skill levels of climate models coincide with regions where large epidemics take place. A better understanding of the role of climate extremes on infectious diseases is urgently needed.