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This 3 page paper analyzes P. Ewald’s work, “Evolution of Infectious Disease” and gives a reaction to his arguments. Bibliography lists 1 source.
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3 pages (~225 words per page)
File: D0_HVPEwald.rtf
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reaction to them. Discussion Ewald begins by challenging conventional wisdom about parasites and their hosts. He writes, "Few ideas have been so ingrained in the literature of medicine and parasitology
as the idea that parasites should evolve toward benign coexistence with their hosts. Few ideas in science have been so widely accepted with so little evidence" (Ewald, 1994, p. 3).
Ewald sets out to challenge this thinking. What this amounts to, Ewald argues, is that scientists who have been "writing about the evolution of virulence have been incorrect through most
of the last century"; what needs to happen now is that they need to find out what is correct (Ewald, 1994, p. 7). He says that applying the principles of
evolution to the disease process reveals that parasites and their hosts do not move toward benignness; he wonders if those same principles "can help us understand why some parasites cause
severe disease while others are nearly always extremely mild" (Ewald, 1994, p. 4). The book is his answer to this puzzle. He says that this question is at the heart
of two new emerging fields of medicine, evolutionary epidemiology and Darwinian medicine (Ewald, 1994). The first builds upon traditional epidemiology (the way diseases move through populations of individuals) to consider
"how the characteristics that traditional epidemiology has identified to be important-lethality, illness, transmission rates, prevalences of infection-change over time as hosts and parasites evolve in response to each other and
to outside environments" (Ewald, 1994, p. 7). Bringing evolutionary biology into health sciences has "spawned an overlapping discipline, termed Darwinian medicine, which takes an evolutionary approach to the entire spectrum
of issues related to health and disease" (Ewald, 1994, p. 7). Perhaps the easiest way to think of this is to consider whether, and to what extent, our evolution as
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