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Cary Conference 2005
Goals

The goals of the conference are to:

• Create new mechanistic frameworks of the effects of disease on ecosystems and of ecosystems on disease. For instance, we will examine under what conditions pathogen effects on hosts fundamentally alter the functioning of the communities and ecosystems in which these hosts occur. Similarly, we will explore the mechanisms by which changes to ecosystems foster proliferation of pathogens, changes in transmission, or changes in virulence.
  
  
• Develop our ability to predict and manage emerging infectious diseases of agriculture, wildlife, and humans, which we characterize as "pre-emptive medicine" (R. Colwell, pers. comm.). Prediction of emergence requires an understanding of both the mechanisms underlying prior and ongoing instances of disease emergence and the generality of those mechanisms. Colwell's "pre-emptive medicine" is an extension of the well-developed concept of "preventive medicine" (which focuses on individual patients) to entire ecosystems. Knowledge of risk factors and their associated probabilities of causing disease can potentially be used pre-emptively to prevent or curtail anticipated outbreaks.
  
  
• Increase communication and interaction among ecologists, physicians, epidemiologists, and veterinarians. This is both a cultural and a scientific goal; we expect that progress with interdisciplinary communication and interaction will lead to rapid scientific advances.
  
  
• Produce an edited book that presents the state of the field of disease ecology to a broad audience. The book is intended to be synthetic, provocative, and as free of technical jargon as possible, so that it can be understood by students, policy experts, and managers as well as by ecological and health care professionals.

Our conference will be unique in three major ways.

1 Although we will incorporate perspectives from population ecology (which shares a longer history with disease-related disciplines), we will focus on the interactions between disease and both multi-species communities and ecosystems.

2 We will focus on both directions of the causal link between diseases and communities/ecosystems (hereafter referred to inclusively as 'ecosystems'). That is, we will explore the effects of disease on ecosystems, the effects of ecosystems on disease, and the potential for feedbacks.

3 We will use ecology to provide a language of translation from one taxomomically-defined specialty (e.g., human epidemiology, veterinary medicine of wildlife or domestic animals, plant pathology) to another.