Infectious diseases remain a major burden for human health, in particular in poor countries: HIV, malaria, measles, diarrhoeal disease and respiratory infections are responsible for more than half of our premature death. Evolution is the driving force of the epidemiology of these diseases. An obvious example is the evolution of resistance following the use of drugs against pathogens or resistance following the use of insecticides against disease vectors. Every year antibiotic resistance costs the US health system more than 20 billion dollars, forces patients to spend an additional 8 million days in hospital and leads to several thousand additional deaths. An other is the evolution of a parasite to jump from its original host to humans to start, for example, epidemics of SARS or ebola. Other consequences of evolution are more subtle: that parasites manipulate our behavjour, causing, for example, more traffic accidents or influencing the choice of whom we have children with; that our vaccines and medicine, despite all of their obvious benefits, might eventually make our parasites more lethal.

Evolutionary Epidemiology of Infectious Diseases brings evolutionary ideas in contact with epidemiology to discuss these and other questions about the evolution of infectious diseases. Written as a textbook for a one-semester course, it gives an evolutionary framework for the study of parasite biology, combining theory with empirical examples. While its examples deal with a wide diversity of parasites, it applies the concepts to the parasites of humans wherever possible. 

The topics of the book are (i) manipulation of behaviour by parasites, (ii) evolution of virulence, (iii) evolution of the host in response to infection, (iv) basics of mathematical epidemiology, (v) evolutionary aspects of the control of infectious diseases, and (vi) emergence of infectious diseases.