Evolutionary Parasitology
During the course of my first undergraduate studies at the University of Edinburgh, (together with Jaap de Roode and Andrew Read) I have been interested in malaria. In particular interested in the study of different classes of parasite clones (Plasmodia) competing to feed on the host organism. This is a common scenario during an infection of malaria.
In repeated experiments with different classes of parasite invading the hosts, it was possible to show that stronger classes of parasite clones outcompete less virulent ones, thereby causing higher exploitation of food resource (blood anaemia and risk of death for the host).
This finding was published in PNAS (de Roode, Pansini et al., 2005).
COVID-19
Pansini R & Fornacca, D (2020) Higher virulence of COVID-19 in the air-polluted regions of eight severely affected countries. medRxiv DOI: 10.1101/2020.04.30.20086496 A news report.
Alas, we found out that in polluted areas of 8 countries, SARS-CoV-2 causes higher morbidity (pathologies) and induces higher mortality. This work stems from an idea I had in March 2020, when it was still not a pandemic, and while I was in a lock-down state in the Italian Po valley region. The atmosphere was grievous, and I was thinking that when we will be successful at defeating the virus, climate change will still be the biggest endeavour the humankind has caused and has been compelled to fix. In April, I was glad to see a handful of colleagues had the same idea. Now the reports about air pollution worsening COVID-19 have become several. I am grateful to Davide Fornacca who teamed up to focus at working handon on the GIS data with the vision to contribute to this science with a long-term environmental perspective.
