The Mosquito Paradox

Urban and food-bred animals as sources of disease

Darkfrog submitted, created time 11 months 2 weeks (www.sciam.com)

According to this writeup in SciAm, the way we grow our food could be breeding new diseases. Most human diseases start out in other species. Even HIV is hypothesized to be an offshoot of SIV. Chickens, they say, are a lot more likely to make us sick than pigeons are (although they're also less likely to excrete on the hood of my car, so it balances out). Now, I would have thought that the move to modern chicken husbandry, where far fewer humans have contact to large numbers of birds, would have made chicken-to-human diseases LESS likely, but it seems it's just the opposite

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Estimation of the number of virus particles transmitted by an insect vector

richard submitted, created time 1 year 2 months (www.pnas.org)

Plant viruses are submitted to narrow population bottlenecks both during infection of their hosts and during horizontal transmission between host individuals. The size of bottlenecks exerted on virus populations during plant invasion has been estimated in a few pathosystems but is not addressed yet for horizontal transmission.

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