Meeting Abstract
A group at the IDEAS RCN workshop prior to the 2018 Ecology and Evolution of Infectious Diseases conference met to address the question “What is Health?”. Impacts on host fitness are often discussed within the fields of eco-immunology, disease ecology, and life-history theory. This definition is useful when phenotypic variation in fitness can be measured. However, in species such as humans, not only can fitness not be easily measured, but health encompasses much more than fitness and should be summarized using measures that account for quality of life. Recent work by David Schneider and collaborators defines disease as a spectrum, that simultaneously captures multiple aspects of homeostasis. Here, we extend this framework by including changes in disease over the host’s life span. This extension allows us to model repeat infection, immune priming, and changes due to targeted interventions (e.g., vaccines). We propose that incorporating exposure history into the reactive scope framework would provide a novel and powerful integrated framework to enhance our ability to predict how changes in individual-level homeostasis maintenance (health) can scale-up to alter population-level disease and health outcomes.
