Fellowship, Geospatial analysis...neglected zoonotic diseases

Infectious diseases which can spread from animals to humans (and vice versa) are called zoonotic diseases. Many of these diseases are common in developing countries, particularly in poor, rural areas where humans live in close proximity to their livestock. The control of zoonotic diseases requires input from both the medical and veterinary services, but in the deprived communities most affected, access to these services is poor and the responsibility for control tends to fall between the two, resulting in underestimation of the true burden of disease, lack of understanding of the disease and minimal control efforts. For this reason, a number of zoonotic diseases occurring in poor and isolated communities have been termed neglected zoonotic diseases (NZDs). The NZDs cause an adverse impact on both humans and livestock (due to illness and, in some cases, death), continuing the cycle of poverty due to reduced productivity in humans and reduced outputs (e.g. meat and milk) from livestock. Therefore, improvements in our understanding of these diseases and how they can best be controlled are urgently needed. Zoonotic disease control programmes are beginning to understand the need for integration of human and animal targeted measures, but to ensure their success a better understanding of the linkages between animal and human disease is required. This research will focus on several NZDs, including trypanosomiasis (which causes nagana in livestock and sleeping sickness in humans), cysticercosis and Rift Valley fever. Many infectious diseases (including NZDs) depend on specific environmental conditions (e.g. the amount of rainfall or the presence of particular land cover types, such as forest or swamp) for transmission and spread. The study will investigate these dependencies to provide an understanding of (a) the relationships between the amount of disease in animals and the amount of disease in humans, (b) how this relationship varies in different types of landscape (e.g. with different land cover) and (c) the reasons why these diseases occur in particular locations and not in others. These findings will provide valuable information to support NZD control, benefiting both human and livestock health and increasing livestock productivity. Due to the dependence of poor, rural communities on their livestock as a main source of income, improved control can, in the long run, help to break the cycle of poverty The research will be conducted by Dr Nicola Wardrop, who works within the academic unit Geography and Environment at the University of Southampton, in collaboration with Professor Peter Atkinson (Geography and Environment, University of Southampton), Professor Sue Welburn (Biomedical Sciences, University of Edinburgh), Dr Eric Fèvre (Biological Science, University of Edinburgh) and Dr Archie Clements (School of Population Health, University of Queensland). The study will use state-of-the-art methods including geographical information systems (GIS), mapping, statistics and spatial modelling to assess the relationships between the transmission of NZDs and environmental factors (e.g. land cover or temperature). Disease data, with spatial references to allow mapping, will be provided by collaborating projects, which are testing human and animal populations for the presence of several NZDs. The planned research is an original and innovative extension of the geographical methods normally used to understand disease distributions. The project will integrate information on both human and animal disease into a single analysis, whereas usually they would be analysed separately. This will provide an additional layer of information, describing the relationship between disease in animals and disease in humans. These methods also provide a means to assess which other (currently unaffected) areas may be at risk of disease transmission, providing vital information for future disease control programmes.