Just finished reading this review article preprint on PeerJ by Major Ben Kirkup from the Walter Reed Army Institute of Research. Called “Counterinsurgency Doctrine Applied to Infectious Disease” this article reviews the existing literature on the human microbiome, gives some background on military counterinsurgency doctrine, and then applies insights from the latter to the former.
This was a fascinating read. I literally couldn’t put it down, the the annoyance of my family and friends while in Yosemite this last weekend. It’s hard to summarize a review article since it’s already such a condensing of a massive amount of literature (42 pages of references!). The best I can do is to say that it gives a good background on both of the relevant topics and really opened my eyes to some new ways of thinking about the problems of antibiotics, and managing our microbiomes.
Read it.
