Abstract
In an effort to strengthen global capacity to prevent, detect, and control infectious diseases in animals and people, the United States Agency for International Development’s (USAID) Emerging Pandemic Threats (EPT) PREDICT project funded development of regional, national, and local One Health capacities for early disease detection, rapid response, disease control, and risk reduction. From the outset, the EPT approach was inclusive of social science research methods designed to understand the contexts and behaviors of communities living and working at human-animal-environment interfaces considered high-risk for virus emergence. Using qualitative and quantitative approaches, PREDICT behavioral research aimed to identify and assess a range of socio-cultural behaviors that could be influential in zoonotic disease emergence, amplification, and transmission. This broad approach to behavioral risk characterization enabled us to identify and characterize human activities that could be linked to the transmission dynamics of new and emerging viruses. This paper provides a discussion of implementation of a social science approach within a zoonotic surveillance framework. We conducted in-depth ethnographic interviews and focus groups to better understand the individual- and community-level knowledge, attitudes, and practices that potentially put participants at risk for zoonotic disease transmission from the animals they live and work with, across 6 interface domains. When we asked highly-exposed individuals (ie. bushmeat hunters, wildlife or guano farmers) about the risk they perceived in their occupational activities, most did not perceive it to be risky, whether because it was normalized by years (or generations) of doing such an activity, or due to lack of information about potential risks. Integrating the social sciences allows investigations of the specific human activities that are hypothesized to drive disease emergence, amplification, and transmission, in order to better substantiate behavioral disease drivers, along with the social dimensions of infection and transmission dynamics. Understanding these dynamics is critical to achieving health security--the protection from threats to health-- which requires investments in both collective and individual health security. Involving behavioral sciences into zoonotic disease surveillance allowed us to push toward fuller community integration and engagement and toward dialogue and implementation of recommendations for disease prevention and improved health security.
Highlights
Globalization has radically catalyzed the everyday movements of people, animals, technology, goods, capital, and services worldwide
As many PREDICT global virus discoveries originated from bat hosts, analyses across all sites where qualitative data was collected focused on bat interfaces, in addition to large wild animal markets which focused on all taxa in the animal value chain
Qualitative interviews and focus groups were collected across 13 countries, and were analyzed according to the following 6 risk interface domains, where humans come inregular contact with bats and other taxa (Fig. 4): Guano farming and harvesting In Vietnam, the guano collection process was identified as an important risk interface in agricultural communities, exposing harvesters, vendors, and farmers purchasing guano at risk for transmission of bat viruses
Summary
Globalization has radically catalyzed the everyday movements of people, animals, technology, goods, capital, and services worldwide While this transformation has been broadly regarded as an economic boon, it has increased the opportunities for diseases to spread geographically and potentially between species [24, 29]. Land use change, such as the building of roads or cities where once there were forests, creates a chain reaction of ecological, socio-economic, human behavioral, and regional fauna impacts that are believed to be linked to how infectious diseases emerge. One Health, an approach that recognizes human, animal, and environmental health as linked, has proven valuable in recent emerging infectious disease research and surveillance efforts and is representative of trends in the transmission of pathogens across species [4]
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