The Social Network in Your Gut

In January of 2011, Ilana Brito maxed out her credit cards and booked a trip to Fiji. At the time, she was a postdoctoral fellow at Columbia University, with a particular interest in how infectious diseases move throughout human communities and the environment. Nine months earlier, Brito had attended a talk in New York by Stacy Jupiter, a marine biologist at the Wildlife Conservation Society’s program in Fiji, who discussed the link between watershed health and human health. In Fiji, cases of typhoid typically spike after cyclones and other serious storms: pools of standing water form, providing safe harbor to Salmonella typhi, the bacterium that causes the illness. Like many other infectious diseases, typhoid can be very difficult to track in humans, but Brito—undaunted by the challenge of this epidemiological quandary—began to wonder whether it was possible instead to follow the bacterium as it travelled. She approached Jupiter after the talk with the idea of piloting the Fiji Community Microbiome Project (FijiCOMP). Soon, she was on her way.