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Copyright © 2008 Koch; licensee BioMed Central Ltd. Stone age diseases and modern AIDS Arthur L Koch  11Biology Department, Indiana University, Bloomington, IN, 47405-6801, USA Corresponding author.Arthur L Koch: koch/at/indiana.edu Received April 6, 2008; Accepted August 7, 2008. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. | ||||
Abstract The great advantage of being a sexually transmitted disease is the ability to survive and specialize solely on a host species that is present in low numbers and widely distributed so that contact between infected and uninfected organisms by chance is rare. Pathogens of a sparse, but widely distributed host species, must either: i) have an alternative host; ii) be able to survive in a dormant state; or iii) be non-destructive to their host. For the pathogens of a diploid there is a particularly effective strategy, that of being sexually transmitted. Then the hosts' themselves transfer the pathogen. | ||||
