A new Lancet article provides a very interesting overview of evolutionary approaches to microbial effects on human health, positive as well as negative. It is available free to those who register on The Lancet website.

Abstract: Medicine and clinical microbiology have traditionally attempted to identify and eliminate the agents that cause disease. However, this traditional approach is becoming inadequate for dealing with a changing disease landscape. Major challenges to human health are non-communicable chronic diseases, often driven by altered immunity and inflammation, and communicable infections from agents which harbour antibiotic resistance. This Review focuses on the so-called evolutionary medicine framework, to study how microbial communities influence human health. The evolutionary medicine framework aims to predict and manipulate microbial effects on human health by integrating ecology, evolutionary biology, microbiology, bioinformatics, and clinical expertise. We focus on the potential of evolutionary medicine to address three key challenges: detecting microbial transmission, predicting antimicrobial resistance, and understanding microbe–microbe and human–microbe interactions in health and disease, in the context of the microbiome.

https://www.thelancet.com/journals/laninf/article/PIIS1473-3099(19)30045-3/fulltext

March 31 is the last day to submit nominations for the $5000 Omenn prize for the best article on evolution and medicine or public health in any journal. Nominate yours…or someone else…today! The winner also gets a trip to Zurich to present a paper at the Fifth ISEMPH Annual Meeting.

April 1 is the last day to submit an abstract for the August ISEMPH meeting in Zurich. You can also register for the meeting now at a discounted rate and get a refund if your plans change.

The International Society for Evolution, Medicine and Public Health is proud to announce the award of the $5000 George C. Williams Prize for 2018 to “Is antagonistic pleiotropy ubiquitous in aging biology?”  by Steven Austad and Jessica Hoffman.

The Prize Committee–Dan Blumstein, Sarah Reece and Richard Bribiescas–was unanimous in its decision. Warm thanks to them and to Andrew Read, Chair of the ISEMPH publications committee for all the work to make this decision, and to Doris Williams who has helped to support this prize.

One of the authors will give a related talk at the August 2019 5th Annual Meeting of the Society in Zurich. Submit your abstract and register now!

The prize is awarded each year to the  first author of the most significant article published in the Society’s flagship journal, Evolution, Medicine and Public Health. Oxford University Press publishes the journal open access. Charles Nunn is the editor. All articles published in 2018 were automatically considered for the Prize. The Prize is made possible by donations from Doris Williams, Randolph Nesse, and other supporters of Evolution Medicine, & Public Health

The Prize recognizes the contributions of George C Williams to evolutionary medicine, and aims to encourage and highlight important research in this growing field. In a seminal 1957 paper, Williams initiated work on several problems central to medicine, including an evolutionary theory of aging and life history traits including menopause. He did important work on the problem of why sex exists. Perhaps his most lasting contribution is his 1966 book Adaptation and Natural Selection, a critique of group selection that transformed how biologists think about the evolution of sociality. In the 1990’s he collaborated with Randolph Nesse on a series of papers and a book that inspired much ongoing work on how evolutionary biology can help us understand disease and improve human health.

To submit an article see http://emph.oxfordjournals.org.