id	author	title	date	pages	extension	mime	words	sentences	flesch	summary	cache	txt
cord-307803-rlvk6bcx	Balloux, Francois	Q&A: What are pathogens, and what have they done to and for us?	2017-10-19		.txt	text/plain	3847	183	46	Infectious diseases have historically represented the most common cause of death in humans until recently, exceeding by far the toll taken by wars or famines. Conversely, Yersinia pestis, another intracellular obligate bacterium and the agent of plague, has a natural life cycle involving alternating infections of rodents and fleas, but can infect essentially any mammalian host. Apart from a few putative ancestral pathogens, including Helicobacter pylori [15] , that might have co-speciated with their human host, the infectious diseases afflicting us were acquired through host jumps from other wild or domesticated animal hosts or sometimes from the wider environment. We might also speculate that the evolutionary potential and high genetic diversity of most pathogens limits our ability to detect protective variants in the human genome, particularly so if these were only effective against a subset of lineages within a pathogenic species.	./cache/cord-307803-rlvk6bcx.txt	./txt/cord-307803-rlvk6bcx.txt