One of the products of human development and population growth is global-scale alteration of the environment, as evidenced by changes in water supply and climate. Environmental change is also evident in the transformation of ecosystems, with accompanying biodiversity loss, biological invasions, and emerging diseases). This interdisciplinary research project aims to understand how these changes affect the global pattern of emerging infectious diseases (EIDs). These diseases are a major threat to human health and the economy in the U.S. and elsewhere. They result in hundreds of thousands of human lives lost annually and tens of billions of dollars to national and global economies. Despite these impacts and billions of dollars spent on drug and vaccine development, there has been little progress in understanding how anthropogenic changes drive the risk of disease emergence globally, nor in developing predictive and preventive approaches to these threats. The investigator's main hypothesis is that socioeconomic and environmental changes, together with disease traits, shape global patterns of disease distribution and emergence. Previous studies have proposed that disease emergence is driven by human population expansion, migration, land-use change, climate change, changes to agriculture and medical technology, increased susceptibility to infection, and other factors. They will test these hypotheses by integrating global-scale socioeconomic and environmental data sets with biogeographic data on wildlife, human and livestock populations, and pathogen distributions. First, they will determine the major drivers of emerging infectious diseases by analyzing the linkages among global spatial datasets on recent changes in socioeconomic and environmental data and the global distribution of zoonotic, food-borne, vector-borne, and drug-resistant EIDs. They then will develop predictive models of current and future risk of disease emergence based on recent changes to and projected trends in human-related drivers. They will use spatial mathematical models to identify geographic regions where there is high potential for disease emergence at local scales and for pandemic (global) spread.
This project will provide education and training opportunities for fifteen undergraduate and graduate students on summer research projects and a postdoctoral assistant. The investigators will make their databases available online to the scientific community through web data portals. They will produce peer-reviewed publications, engage in offer media interviews, make conference presentations, give policy-relevant briefings, and work with developing country non-governmental organization leaders who incorporate environmental health issues into their programs. They will disseminate their results to national and intergovernmental agencies of public health (WHO, CDC), development (UNDP, IDRC), trade (FAO, OIE), and conservation (IUCN, DIVERSITAS, UNESCO, UNEP, EPA). The project's ultimate goal is to have its research results and products used to help decide how best to allocate the scarce funds and resources available for surveillance and control of disease in global public health and development. An award resulting from the FY 2008 NSF-wide competition on Human and Social Dynamics (HSD) supports this project. All NSF directorates and offices are involved in the coordinated management of the HSD competition and the portfolio of HSD awards.
