Can Ecological Studies Predict or Prevent Disease Outbreaks?
For Lyme disease, then, Ostfeld’s ecological studies suggest that new housing developments could be designed to minimise the risk of people contracting Lyme disease around their homes. Furthermore, because the risk of Lyme disease is known to increase two years after a good acorn year, a major food source for white-footed mice (Figure 3), one simple preventative measure, suggests Ostfeld, might be to have a ‘Smoky the Mouse’ warning system, featuring posters in wilderness areas advertising local high or low Lyme disease risk predictions based on acorn crop records. For other rodent-borne diseases, an awareness of when rodent populations are increasing is already passed onto the general public, and for those rodents that enter human habitation, this can be accompanied by advice on how to avoid rodent infestations in homes. Similarly, for mosquito-borne diseases, education about how to avoid mosquito bites can go some way to reducing the magnitude of disease outbreaks.
