The Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology embraces education and research on all aspects of biodiversity, including the history of life on earth, the evolutionary mechanisms that generate diversity, the ecological context in which all life has evolved, and the consequences of interactions among organisms, including humans. Faculty expertise ranges from bacteria to mastodons, from the tropics to the tundra, from the theoretical to the practical.
Faculty searches: microbial ecology and computational evolutionary biology
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pertussis bacterium

 

Whooping cough immunity long-lasting, study shows
Immunity to whooping cough lasts at least 30 years on average, much longer than previously thought, an analysis by Professor Pejman Rohani and his former postdoctoral fellow, Helen Wearing, shows. The study was published in the open-access journal PLoS Pathogens in October 2009.

Once thought to be under control, thanks to widespread childhood vaccination, whooping cough (pertussis) has been on the rise since the 1980s in the United States and several other countries. This increase has fueled concerns about the effectiveness of current vaccination practices and raised the question of whether whooping cough can ever be eradicated.


One leading idea for the recent surprising increase in cases is that the immunity conferred by vaccination or previous exposure wears off after some time. Because these are tough questions to address clinically, the researchers took a different approach. (more)

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