index.qmd

# Preface {.unnumbered}

![](figs/slowing-epidemic.png){fig-align="center"}

These are the course notes that accompany my Stanford course, Global Change and Emerging Infectious Disease.

This is a lecture course on the changing epidemiological environment, with particular attention to the ways in which anthropogenic environmental changes are altering the ecology of infectious disease transmission, thereby promoting their re-emergence as a public health threat. The course combines in approximately equal measure ecology, evolutionary biology, epidemiology, and anthropology. We begin by developing general tools for understanding the ecology of emerging infectious disease, including transmission-dynamics models of infectious disease and the basic reproduction number, complex ecology, metapopulation biology, and mixing ecology. 

The course is organized thematically around five broad modes of global change that have a substantial impact on the emergence, re-emergence, and persistence of infectious disease. These include: (1) Climate Change, (2) Migration/Mobility (both human and nonhuman), (3) Habitat/Biodiversity Destruction, (4) Social and Economic Inequality, and (5) Changing Selective Landscapes and Accelerated Evolution.

The course introduces a series of case studies, where we focus on the role that environmental changes (such as deforestation and land-use conversion, urbanization, human migration, international commerce, and climate change) play in contemporary disease transmission. Case studies include: Ebola, Virus Disease, Lyme Disease, Malaria, Measles, Plague, Dengue, SARS CoV-1, and SARS CoV-2 (COVID-19).

We'll see if the case studies make their way into these notes.