News & Events
Antibiotic resistance is an ecological challenge around the world
Antibiotic resistance is a worldwide health problem usually addressed with newer drugs and controls on needless overuse of antibiotics. But a team of researchers led by Emory’s Maya Nadimpalli believes antibiotic resistance is also an environmental problem, especially in low and middle income countries where inadequate water and sanitation infrastructure can make resistant pathogens more likely to move between humans and animals. Nadimpalli, assistant professor in the Rollins School of Public Health, worked with researchers from five countries to track the spread of antibiotic resistance between humans and animals in Cambodia, a middle income country. Comparing stretches of DNA that encode antibiotic resistance genes from E-coli recovered from humans and meat, they found bacteria from both humans and animals carried a similar piece of DNA showing resistance to the same antibiotics. In places where public health infrastructure was lacking, this bacterial flow can make the rise and spread of antibiotic resistant pathogens worse. Their study, published in Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment, is important because almost 5 million deaths per year can be attributed to antibiotic resistant bacteria, and low- and middle- income countries have unique points where humans and animals interact. This contributes to the global rise of bacteria resistant to antibiotics.
Dr. Nadimpalli is a faculty member in the PBEE program.
Population, Biology, Ecology and Evolution (PBEE) alumna, Dr. Amanda Vicente-Santos awarded the Ecology Letters Early Career Researcher Award
Population, Biology, Ecology and Evolution (PBEE) alumna, Dr. Amanda Vicente-Santos, was recently awarded the Ecology Letters Early Career Researcher Award by Wiley for her dissertation chapter entitled, “Host-pathogen interactions under pressure: a review and meta-analysis of stress-mediated effects on disease dynamics.” Each year the Ecology Letters Early Career Researcher Award recognizes one outstanding contribution to research by an early career researcher.
Find out more about how Vincente-Santos is working with bats to help avert the next potential pandemic.
Click to read Amanda's full story.
Modeling mosquito flight to study their behaviors
Mosquitoes are sometimes referred to as the deadliest animals on Earth, spreading diseases that kill an estimated 725,000 people per year. Compared to the outsized impact of these insects relatively little is known about their behaviors.
The Research Corporation for Science Advancement awarded a $100,000 Scialog grant to measure and model mosquito flight and movement behavior at high spatiotemporal resolution. Principal investigators are Gonzalo Vazquez-Prokopec, PhD, a disease ecologist and associate professor in Emory’s Department of Environmental Sciences, and Gauillaume Bastille-Rousseau from Southern Illinois University.
Scialog grants support research by stimulating interdisciplinary conversation and community building around important scientific themes.
Vazquez-Prokopec, who is a faculty member in the PBEE program, studies the complex interactions between pathogens, their hosts and the environment that shape how diseases spread and epidemics are propagated. Tapping technology capable of photographing flying mosquitos at the rate of 100 images per second, the researchers will collect data on their movements through space and use it to create 3D models of their flight patterns. These simulations will help them to test mysteries such as how the insects react to different repellants, how they spend their time when they are not biting us and why they seem to prefer biting some people more than others.
