Capacity building efforts and perceptions for wildlife surveillance to detect zoonotic pathogens: comparing stakeholder perspectives

BACKGROUND: The capacity to conduct zoonotic pathogen surveillance in wildlife is critical for the recognition and identification of emerging health threats. The PREDICT project, a component of United States Agency for International Development’s Emerging Pandemic Threats program, has introduced capacity building efforts to increase zoonotic pathogen surveillance in wildlife in global ‘hot spot’ regions where zoonotic disease emergence is likely to occur. Understanding priorities, challenges, and opportunities from the perspectives of the stakeholders is a key component of any successful capacity building program. METHODS: A survey was administered to wildlife officials and to PREDICT-implementing in-country project scientists in 16 participating countries in order to identify similarities and differences in perspectives between the groups regarding capacity needs for zoonotic pathogen surveillance in wildlife. RESULTS: Both stakeholder groups identified some human-animal interfaces (i.e. areas of high contact between wildlife and humans with the potential risk for disease transmission), such as hunting and markets, as important for ongoing targeting of wildlife surveillance. Similarly, findings regarding challenges across stakeholder groups showed some agreement in that a lack of sustainable funding across regions was the greatest challenge for conducting wildlife surveillance for zoonotic pathogens (wildlife officials: 96% and project scientists: 81%). However, the opportunity for improving zoonotic pathogen surveillance capacity identified most frequently by wildlife officials as important was increasing communication or coordination among agencies, sectors, or regions (100% of wildlife officials), whereas the most frequent opportunities identified as important by project scientists were increasing human capacity, increasing laboratory capacity, and the growing interest or awareness regarding wildlife disease or surveillance programs (all identified by 69% of project scientists). CONCLUSIONS: A One Health approach to capacity building applied at local and global scales will have the greatest impact on improving zoonotic pathogen surveillance in wildlife. This approach will involve increasing communication and cooperation across ministries and sectors so that experts and stakeholders work together to identify and mitigate surveillance gaps. Over time, this transdisciplinary approach to capacity building will help overcome existing challenges and promote efficient targeting of high risk interfaces for zoonotic pathogen transmission

The Aerosphere as a Network Connector of Organisms and Their Diseases

Aeroecological processes, especially powered flight of animals, can rapidly connect biological communities across the globe. This can have profound consequences for evolutionary diversification, energy and nutrient transfers, and the spread of infectious diseases. The latter is of particular consequence for human populations, since migratory birds are known to host diseases which have a history of transmission into domestic poultry or even jumping to human hosts. In this chapter, we present a scenario under which a highly pathogenic avian influenza (HPAI) strain enters North America from East Asia via postmolting waterfowl migration. We use an agent-based model (ABM) to simulate the movement and disease transmission among 106 generalized waterfowl agents originating from ten molting locations in eastern Siberia, with the HPAI seeded in only ~102 agents at one of these locations. Our ABM tracked the disease dynamics across a very large grid of sites as well as individual agents, allowing us to examine the spatiotemporal patterns of change in virulence of the HPAI infection as well as waterfowl host susceptibility to the disease. We concurrently simulated a 12-station disease monitoring network in the northwest USA and Canada in order to assess the potential efficacy of these sites to detect and confirm the arrival of HPAI. Our findings indicated that HPAI spread was initially facilitated but eventually subdued by the migration of host agents. Yet, during the 90-day simulation, selective pressures appeared to have distilled the HPAI strain to its most virulent form (i.e., through natural selection), which was counterbalanced by the host susceptibility being conversely reduced (i.e., through genetic predisposition and acquired immunity). The monitoring network demonstrated wide variation in the utility of sites; some were clearly better at providing early warnings of HPAI arrival, while sites further from the disease origin exposed the selective dynamics which slowed the spread of the disease albeit with the result of passing highly virulent strains into southern wintering locales (where human impacts are more likely). Though the ABM presented had generalized waterfowl migration and HPAI disease dynamics, this exercise demonstrates the power of such simulations to examine the extremely large and complex processes which comprise aeroecology. We offer insights into how such models could be further parameterized to represent HPAI transmission risks as well as how ABMs could be applied to other aeroecological questions pertaining to individual-based connectivity