Sonia Altizer^*
*Correspondence: Sonia Altizer, Department of Ecology, University of Georgia, Athens, USA, Email:

Received: 09-Dec-2021 Published: 30-Dec-2021

Editorial Note

Disease ecology is a branch of ecology that studies the processes, patterns, and consequences of host-pathogen interactions, particularly infectious disease interactions, in the context of environmental variables. The idea behind disease ecology is that host-pathogen interactions may be conceptually linked to other interspecific interactions like predation and parasitism.

The interaction of host behaviour and ecology with pathogen biology as it relates to disease effect on populations is known as disease ecology. While disease ecology is sometimes described in terms of ecology as a whole, it brings together ideas from a wide range of medical and biological disciplines, such as immunology, epidemiology, and genetics.

Diseases may have a huge impact on all creatures, and disease ecology is one of the most active fields of research in modern biology. Natural ecosystems play an important role in diseases, and human actions have the potential to significantly change disease ecology. A disease must be effectively transferred to a new host before its current host dies or heals in order to spread. The threshold theorem is based on this observation: if the density of susceptible hosts is below a critical value, disease transmission will not occur quickly enough to allow the number of infected persons to rise.

The extension of epidemiology's threshold theorem to public health is the foundation of human vaccination programmes; specifically, if enough people in a population are vaccinated, the density of susceptible individuals will be lowered enough to avoid epidemics. Diseases had quite a significant impact on human history. In the Middle Ages, for example, plague cycles destroyed European populations.

Interactions in disease ecology

Parasite ecological interactions (defined here to include both macroparasites and microparasites) are notoriously difficult to monitor. Many people spend their lives in secret, in close contact with their hosts but hidden from the rest of the world.Parasites, with a few significant exceptions (e.g., tapeworms), are often quite tiny. Because parasites are typically unseen, it's tempting to believe that they play a lesser role in community ecology than free-living creatures. Advances in the study of disease ecology have revealed that parasites are not only ecologically significant, but they may also have an impact on community structure that is equivalent to or greater than that of free-living organismse. In fact, parasitism is more frequent as a consumer lifestyle than conventional predation, and it is perhaps the most common life-history strategy in nature. Parasites can also affect host behaviour and fitness, as well as host population numbers, which can have significant implications for trophic interactions, food webs, competition, biodiversity, and keystone species. These interactions demonstrate that parasites play an important role in determining the organisation of communities and ecosystems.

Parasitism and trophic interactions

Because they are disease carriers, parasitism in disease ecology is significant because it may influence how various ecosystems operate. The timing of events, biogeochemical cycles, and even the flow of energy in a habitat can all be affected by these illnesses. Parasites have the ability to inhibit species’ population growth and reproduction, which can cause an ecosystem’s equilibrium to change. Parasites also have an influence on systems through nutrient cycles. Through their interaction with a host and the food of the host, parasites can cause elemental imbalances in a system.