How does understanding the evolution of virulence help us to manage infectious disease?
For most of the last two centuries people have been using interventions to knock down infectious diseases as much as possible. The idea is that we’re going to use weapons like vaccines and antibiotics or hygienic interventions to reduce the frequency of infection as much as possible. My point is that there’s another way of controlling these disease organisms. Instead of using these weapons — antibiotics and vaccines and hygiene improvements — as a way of knocking down the organism, we can use those interventions to control the evolution of the organisms instead of getting the organisms evolving around our interventions. We can get the organisms to evolve to be less harmful than they have been in the past. Essentially, what I’m saying is we can use interventions like vaccines or like hygienic improvements to domesticate these organisms. That argument may seem a little bit surprising, but we’ve already domesticated organisms in many ways. One of the most obvious ways is when we make li
