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Ecology for Global Health

Master in Life Science, ENS

UNBIO1-109 (EfGH) | Ecology for Global Health
Level | Semester : M2 | S1
Where : Biology department, ENS
Duration : 1 week
Dates : December 2-6, 2024
Maximum class size : 30 students

—2024-2025 programme to come—

Coordination

Kévin JEAN, ENS-PSL

Credits

3 ECTS

Keywords

Infectious disease ecology| EcoHealth | One Health | Planetary Health

Course prerequisites

Introduction to Ecology (BIO-IN-G08-S1 or equivalent)
Some experience in data analysis with R

Course objectives and description
Aims

This course aims to present how considering ecological determinants and processes can contribute to the understanding and preservation of human health, especially in the era of the Anthropocene.
In the first part, this module will present how approaches and concepts derived from ecology can be applied to human pathologies, primarily infectious diseases. In the second part, we will discuss how different holistic approaches to health (One Health, EcoHealth, Planetary Health) allow for connecting human health to ecosystem health.

Themes
  1. Applying ecological concepts in health
    a) Functional ecology : the ecological niche model applied to infectious disease
    b) Community ecology : host-pathogen interactions, meta-populations
    c) Biogeography : understanding global patterns in disease distributions
  2. Grasping human and planetary health as whole
    a) One Health : ecological processes behind pathogen (re)emergence
    b) Planetary health : how ecosystems degradations shapes the spatio-temporal distribution of communicable and non-communicable chronic disease
Organization

This is a one-week intensive course based on lecture-style presentations. Some of these presentations may be complemented by data analysis tutorials (in R).

Suggested readings
  1. Hay SI, Battle KE, Pigott DM, Smith DL, Moyes CL, Bhatt S, et al. Global mapping of infectious disease. Philos Trans R Soc Lond B Biol Sci. 2013 ;368 : 20120250. doi:10.1098/rstb.2012.0250
  2. Myers SS. Planetary health : protecting human health on a rapidly changing planet. The Lancet. 2017 ;390 : 2860–2868. doi:10.1016/S0140-6736(17)32846-5
  3. Jones KE, Patel NG, Levy MA, Storeygard A, Balk D, Gittleman JL, et al. Global trends in emerging infectious diseases. Nature. 2008 ;451 : 990–993. doi:10.1038/nature06536
  4. Jean K, Burnside WR, Carlson L, Smith K, Guégan J-F. An equilibrium theory signature in the island biogeography of human parasites and pathogens. Glob Ecol Biogeogr. 2016 ;25 : 107–116. doi:10.1111/geb.12393
  5. Pigott DM, Golding N, Mylne A, Huang Z, Henry AJ, Weiss DJ, et al. Mapping the zoonotic niche of Ebola virus disease in Africa. Jha P, editor. eLife. 2014 ;3 : e04395. doi:10.7554/eLife.04395
  6. Conseil scientifique COVID-19 (2022) « One Health » — Une Seule Sante Sante Humaine, Animale, Environnement : Les Leçons De La Crise.