Abstract
In his 2008 strategic vision for the National Institutes of Health of the United States, Director Elias Zerhouni argued that medical care in the twenty-first century needs to be redirected (Zerhouni 2008). Despite progress in the practice of preventive medicine, he stated, most treatment still focuses on late intervention, once a patient’s symptoms are already apparent. We need, he argued, to move instead toward “preemptive medicine” in which the development of symptoms is prevented altogether. Zerhouni illustrated this new approach by describing the discovery of genes that predispose certain individuals to particular diseases. With this knowledge, he argued, public health care providers could focus on prevention and early diagnosis in high-risk patients, rather than just on treatment.
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- 1.
Important exceptions to this general rule occur, for example, when environmental factors such as climate warming accelerate biting rates of some vectors.
- 2.
The probability that a human being will become infected by this vector depends on the likelihood that the vector is infected (which is frequency dependent) and the number of times infected vectors feed on the human (which is related to the density of vectors). In this way, transmission of vector-borne diseases can be both frequency and density dependent.
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Keesing, F., Ostfeld, R.S. (2012). Disease Ecology. In: Ingram, J., DeClerck, F., Rumbaitis del Rio, C. (eds) Integrating Ecology and Poverty Reduction. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4419-0633-5_13
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