The epidemiology of infectious diseases is one of the great triumphs of applied ecology. In particular, the public health importance of parasites has lead to a large literature, exploring their impact on the population dynamics, population genetics and evolutionary biology of human populations. An important milestone was the Dahlem Conference on population biology of infectious diseases, held in 1981. The resulting book (Anderson and May 1982) lucidly summarised the contemporary state of parasite ecology and epidemiology. The meeting was also important in bringing together theoretical and empirical workers from a range of relevant disciplines. Their deliberations, in a series of group reports, set the scene for many developments in.
