Counterinsurgency Doctrine Applied to Infectious Disease
1
Department of Wound Infections, Walter Reed Army Institute of Research, Silver Spring, MD, USA
2
Dept of Medicine, FE Hebert School of Medicine, Uniformed Services University of the Health Sciences, Bethesda, MD, USA
- Published
- Accepted
- Subject Areas
- Ecology, Microbiology, Infectious Diseases
- Keywords
- counterinsurgency, infectious disease, microbiome, microbiology, microbial ecology, insurgency, war metaphor, antibiotics, antivirulence, pathogen
- Copyright
- © 2014 Kirkup
- Licence
- This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, reproduction and adaptation in any medium and for any purpose provided that it is properly attributed. For attribution, the original author(s), title, publication source (PeerJ PrePrints) and either DOI or URL of the article must be cited.
- Cite this article
- 2014. Counterinsurgency Doctrine Applied to Infectious Disease. PeerJ PrePrints 2:e236v1 https://doi.org/10.7287/peerj.preprints.236v1
Abstract
Recent scientific discoveries lead inexorably to the conclusion that the ‘total human’ incorporates a necessary body of numerous microbes, including bacteria. These bacteria play a very important role in immunity by actively resisting infections by outside bacteria; however, under certain conditions they can degrade their community. They can arrogate to themselves resources that normally flow through other metabolic pathways and form persistent biological structures. In this situation, these bacteria constitute an insurgency, with strategic ramifications.