The vector-borne Zika virus joins avian influenza, Ebola, and yellow fever as recent public health crises threatening pandemicity. By a combination of stochastic modeling and economic geography, this book proposes two key causes together explain the explosive spread of the worst of the vector-borne outbreaks. Ecosystems in which such pathogens are largely controlled by environmental stochasticity are being drastically streamlined by both agribusiness-led deforestation and deficits in public health and environmental sanitation. Consequently, a subset of infections that once burned out relatively quickly in local forests are now propagating across susceptible human populations whose vulnerability to infection is often exacerbated in structurally adjusted cities. The resulting outbreaks are characterized by greater global extent, duration, and momentum. As infectious diseases in an age of nation states and global health programs cannot, as much of the present modeling literature presumes, be described by interacting populations of host, vector, and pathogen alone, a series of control theory models is also introduced here. These models, useful to researchers and health officials alike, explicitly address interactions between government ministries and the pathogens they aim to control.

Plant Disease, Volume I: How Disease is Managed is part of a five-volume treatise that discusses the sociology of plant pathology. This volume discusses the great variety of techniques for the diagnosis of plant disease; crop destruction; and theory behind the art of disease management. It also explores topics on how society is constraining the possibilities for management; management of diseases through changing the environment; biological control of plant diseases; weed management through pathogens; and the epidemiologic and genetic concepts of managing host genes. Subsequent chapter presents the management of plant disease with chemicals and some examples of diseases that benefit man and even a few that benefit plants. This book also describes the organization and operation of society-supported disease management activities, as well as important advisory services provided by the industry. This volume concludes with proposals for the education of the practitioners of plant pathology. This work is intended for the advanced researcher in plant pathology to broaden his views, stimulate his thinking, and help to synthesize ideas.