Nutrition and Infectious Diseases: Shifting the Clinical Paradigm

This comprehensive and user-friendly volume focuses on the intersection between the fields of nutrition and infectious disease. It highlights the importance of nutritional status in infectious disease outcomes, and the need to recognize the role that nutrition plays in altering the risk of exposure and susceptibility to infection, the severity of the disease, and the effectiveness of treatment. Split into four parts, section one begins with a conceptual model linking nutritional status and infectious diseases, followed by primers on nutrition and immune function, that can serve as resources for students, researchers and practitioners. Section two provides accessible overviews of major categories of pathogens and is intended to be used as antecedents of pathogen-focused subsequent chapters, as well as to serve as discrete educational resources for students, researchers, and practitioners. The third section includes five in-depth case studies on specific infectious diseases where nutrition-infection interactions have been extensively explored: diarrheal and enteric disease, HIV and tuberculosis, arboviruses, malaria, and soil-transmitted helminths. The final section addresses cross-cutting topics such as drug-nutrient interactions, co-infections, and nutrition, infection, and climate change and then concludes by consolidating relevant clinical and public health approaches to addressing infection in the context of nutrition, and thus providing a sharp focus on the clinical relevance of the intersection between nutrition and infection