Epidemiology of contagious diseases, ecology of mammals, health, management and conservation biology: concluding remarks.

In conclusion to the Proceedings of the Symposium on the Health and management of free-ranging mammals (held in Nancy, France, in 1991), the author presents a review of the literature on the ecology of diseases of wild mammals. This discipline involves the ecology of both pathogens and hosts. The ecology of a pathogen may be considered as a synonym of epidemiology, i.e. the mode of transmission and circulation of parasites, their origin, invasion and persistence. The ecology of the host deals with the outcome of infection within different geographical and time scales: a) the impact on population density and communities within the time scale of the "observer" b) the effect of infection on the co-evolution of hosts and pathogens within the evolutionary time scale. This account is illustrated by numerous examples from field studies, as well as mathematical models, and concludes by examining the effect of pathogens on biodiversity, human health and the health of domestic animals.