The session recording will be archived on the site until June 25th, 2023

This session was streamed but not recorded

Curated Track: 

Description:

The accelerated emergence and re-emergence of human pathogens poses substantial global health challenges. Viral, bacterial, and parasitic pathogens are constantly evolving to better evade immune responses, become drug-resistant, and go undetected through existing surveillance and detection methods. Humans too, are impacted differentially, with certain subpopulations more susceptible or more resistant to particular pathogens. Additionally, human-environment interactions via expansion of road networks, increased human mobility, changing water and hygiene interactions, population growth and migration, and extensification and intensification of agricultural production etc., create novel patterns of human-pathogen interactions and disease in space and time. Hence, to fully understand the risk and the underlying processes influencing pathogen ecology and evolution it is important to examine the interplay between human/host genetics, pathogen genetics and the ecological environment.

While many health and medical geography studies of infectious diseases have examined human-environment drivers of infectious diseases, they traditionally do not incorporate data on human/host genetics, and tend to treat infectious diseases as static binary (presence or absence) outcomes. Similarly, studies incorporating host and pathogen genetic data often lack environmental data and geographical context. Recent advances in computing, and the availability of publicly accessible high resolution geospatial, genetic, and disease data have enabled potential for substantially deeper understanding of processes driving pathogenic evolution and disease. For example, interdisciplinary fields such as landscape genetics and ecogeographic epidemiology combine methods from diverse fields such as landscape ecology and population genetics, and focus on ‘landscape’ as an organizing container where ecological processes, human-environment interactions, and pathogenic evolution overlap and interact with each other. Exploring spatial variation in genetics can illuminate how organisms exist in and move across the landscape, and examining the geographical context (such as the local social, natural, and built environment) can highlight the underlying processes of pathogen evolution and differential disease patterns.

However, considerable theoretical and methodological challenges remain, and there are few interdisciplinary studies demonstrating real-world linkages between ecological, evolutionary, and health outcomes. This session aims to bring together scholars and practitioners from a diverse range of disciplines such as geography, ecology, genetics, public health, sociology, biology, bioinformatics, human and veterinary medicine to present ongoing research, discuss current challenges, and explore future directions. The topics we welcome include, but are not limited to:

● Empirical studies exploring real-world linkages between human-environmental interactions and pathogenic evolution (Eg: impact of LULC on evolution of drug resistance, climate change on infectious disease re-emergence)

● Identifying gene-environment interactions and their associations with differential health outcomes in vulnerable human populations

● ‘One Health’ research papers exploring health outcomes at the human-animal-environment interface

● Advances/challenges in spatial and geostatistical methods incorporating genomic/genetic data or advances in genetic/genomic methods involving spatial data

● Study design or data collection approaches/challenges to incorporate ecological, spatial, and pathogen or/and host genetics data

● Theoretical issues and developments in integrating ecological and evolutionary approaches to studying infectious disease outcomes

This session is a part of the Geospatial Health Research Symposium, which is organized by the Health and Medical Geography Specialty Group. This yearly symposium aims to bring together national and international scholars, practitioners, and policy makers from different specialties, institutions, sectors, and continents to share ideas, findings, methodologies, and technologies, and to establish and strengthen personal connections, communication channels, and research collaborations. For more information about the symposium, please feel free to contact Paul Delamater at pld@email.unc.edu.

References and Suggested Readings:

Carrel, M., & Emch, M. (2013). Genetics: A New Landscape for Medical Geography. Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 103(6), 1452–1467. https://doi.org/10.1080/00045608.2013.784102

Carrel, M., Patel, J., Taylor, S. M., Janko, M., Mwandagalirwa, M. K., Tshefu, A. K., Escalante, A. A., McCollum, A., Alam, M. T., Udhayakumar, V., Meshnick, S., & Emch, M. (2015). The geography of malaria genetics in the Democratic Republic of Congo: A complex and fragmented landscape. Social Science & Medicine, 133, 233–241. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.socscimed.2014.10.037

Janko, M., Goel, V., & Emch, M. (2019). Extending multilevel spatial models to include spatially varying coefficients. Health & Place, 60, 102235. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.healthplace.2019.102235

Keim, P. S., & Wagner, D. M. (2009). Humans and evolutionary and ecological forces shaped the phylogeography of recently emerged diseases. Nature Reviews Microbiology, 7(11), Article 11. https://doi.org/10.1038/nrmicro2219

Sloan, C. D., Duell, E. J., Shi, X., Irwin, R., Andrew, A. S., Williams, S. M., & Moore, J. H. (2009). Ecogeographic Genetic Epidemiology. Genetic Epidemiology, 33(4), 281–289. https://doi.org/10.1002/gepi.20386

Non-Presenting Participants