Recent outbreaks of diseases like Hantavirus and Ebola have been unusually aggressive, and this comes at a time when there have been cuts to federal agencies that normally funds this science. But at the same time, scientists, including many students, are pushing to continue their research.
“We’re hearing about Hantavirus outbreaks of novel Hantavirus strains that can be transmitted, you know, person to person,” said Kate Langwig, an infectious disease ecologist at Virginia Tech. “And yet at the same time, we’re seeing the smallest amount of resources ever available.”
Langwig and her colleagues organized a recent conference at Virginia Tech, which was attended by nearly 450 scientists who study the ecology and evolution of infectious diseases.
“The fact that so many people are able to come here at a time of so much uncertainty in the funding landscape speaks to the fact that the work that they’re doing is really good and really important,” Langwig said.
Disease ecology is an interdisciplinary field that explores questions like why are some pathogens more harmful than others, and what causes outbreaks, explained Dana Hawley, another conference organizer.
“An ecological approach is trying to understand in a more predictive way why diseases emerge. When they do, and what are the drivers of that,” Hawley explained.
Hawley said a lot of the foundational research in this field explores pathogens in animals, which can help prevent diseases from spreading to humans, or from humans to non-human animals.
“The research being done in this field allows us to draw broader conclusions about the ways infectious diseases move through, persist in, and impact host populations,” said Joseph Hoyt, another conference organizer whose research, in collaboration with Langwig and others, has found some animals can be infected by COVID-19, likely from contact with humans.
“There’s always going to be a next pandemic. And if any group of people can help understand why, where, and when that will happen and what the consequences will be,” Hawley said. “I think this is a group of people that can really help shed some key light on those issues more broadly.”
This was the first time Virginia Tech hosted this conference, which was supported by the university’s Global Change Center and the Center for Emerging, Zoonotic, and Arthropod-borne Pathogens.
