How a House Finch Disease Reshaped What We Know About Epidemics
By Andrea Alfano - Cornell University Senior December 2, 2013
In research that may help doctors learn how to tame human epidemics, Cornell Lab scientists are learning about how diseases move between species, and what makes them more or less deadly as time goes by. They're studying House Finch eye disease, a kind of conjunctivitis that members of Project FeederWatch helped find when it first emerged in 1994—and subsequently tracked as it spread through finches across the continent. Since then, we've been able to learn valuable lessons about how epidemics progress—read our full story.