Medical Geography & Genetics
Overview
Landscape genetics is a field that uses methods from landscape ecology and data from population genetics to explore patterns of genetics in space and determine the underlying processes that produce those patterns. Landscape genetics is a natural extension for the field of disease ecology in medical/health geography, which has place emphasis on how humans interact with their environment in ways that produce or prevent health outcomes. Extending this disease ecology framework to how human-environment interactions influence the evolution of pathogens allows medical/health geographers to answer questions about what type of ecologies are conducive to the development and spread of drug resistance, to the emergence of a novel pathogen, to the rapid evolution of existing pathogens, and to the barriers that may prevent these novel or emerging types from diffusing.
Papers
Carrel, M. (2015) Disease at the molecular scale: Methods for exploring spatial patterns of pathogen genetics. In Spatial Analysis in Health Geography. Delmelle, E., Paez, A. & Kanaroglou, P. eds. London: Ashgate.
Carrel, M. & Emch, M. (2013) Genetics: A new landscape for medical geography. Annals of the Association of American Geographers. 103(6): 1452-1467.
Carrel, M. & Emch, M. (2013) Genetics: A new landscape for medical geography. Annals of the Association of American Geographers. 103(6): 1452-1467.