Doorways in nature: Syndemics zoonotics and public health. A commentary on Rock Buntain Hatfield Hallgrímsson

摘要

Nature writer, Douglas Chadwick notes that because they are not a single organism but rather an interactive community of species, he thinks of lichens as kind of a between organisms or individual species and ecosystems. “Look out one direction,” he writes, “and you see individual things; look the other way, you see processes, relationships—things together. This is the new level in understanding biology” ( , p. 119). And it is this new understanding that the authors of Syndemic Approach to Prevention ( ) bring to their analysis of the significance of zoonosis—the movement of diseases between non-human animal species and humans—in the development of health threatening syndemics like bovine tuberculosis.