Imported Plant Diseases

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I found myself debating whether or not I should read Lewis, Petrovskii, and Potts’ text The Mathematics Behind Biological Invasions a while back, but at the time I in the end decided that it would simply be too much work to justify the potential payoff – so instead of reading the book, I decided to just watch the above lecture and leave it at that. This lecture is definitely a very poor textbook substitute, and I was strongly debating whether or not to blog it because it just isn’t very good; the level of coverage is very low. Which is sad, because some of the diseases discussed in the lecture – like e.g. wheat leaf rust – are really important and worth knowing about. One of the important points made in the lecture is that in the context of potential epidemics, it can be difficult to know when and how to intervene because of the uncertainty involved; early action may be the more efficient choice in terms of resource use, but the earlier you intervene, the less certain will be the intervention payoff and the less you’ll know about stuff like transmission patterns (…would outbreak X ever really have spread very wide if we had not intervened? We don’t observe the counterfactual…). Such aspects of course are not only relevant to plant-diseases, and the lecture also contains other basic insights from epidemiology which apply to other types of disease – but if you’ve ever opened a basic epidemiology text you’ll know all these things already.