engleski

Health effects of human population isolation and admixture

The actions and choices made by individual human beings in space and time may lead to their temporary or permanent isolation from the other living individuals. Some of the examples could be either working at a lighthouse, or time spent in prison, or voluntary withdrawal to investigate less populated areas. The same, but at different scale, can also happen to human populations. Living in the era of globalisation, which provides us with ever-increasing means of communication and transport, creates an impression that there is hardly a possibility for any population to remain isolated from the others. However, the truth is quite the opposite: the gap between those who benefit from these processes (such as informatics technology boom, telecommunication industry explosion and genomic revolution) and those who do not is actually widening, and the number of people living in isolated communities globally, and whose isolation from other populations is increasing, is largely underestimated.

human populations; public health; genetic epidemiology; admixture; outbreeding; isolates

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