Socializing One Health: an innovative strategy to investigate social and behavioral risks of emerging viral threats

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

Use of "Dream" in Faulkner's the Unvanquished

William Faulkner's chronicle of Yoknapatawpha county was gained a considerable prominence in the literary world. Based on the history of Mississippi, this chronicle presents a grand pageant of numerous distinct characters in their personal conflicts and social affairs. The romantic people of Faulkner's South generally indulged in a self-destroying dream of heroic courage, reckless gallantry, and glorious obstinancy even at times when their social moral obligations ought to have been changed in keeping with the rapid growth of the age of machines. This dream was largely influenced by a legendary aristocratic heritage. The Unvanquished is one of many novels and stories which portray this idea very distinctly. The Unvanquished also displays Faulkner's own apprehension and criticism about the Southerner's inclination to distort the past and creat a myth not based in fact. This study focuses on the apparent insistence of Faulkner in The Unvanquished that the dream based on the distorted myth is so deep in the minds of a representative southern aristocratic family that no isolated efforts or attempt of any conscientious individual can alter their beliefs and behaviors. The analysis of the various dreams and their dreamers in The Unvanquished also focues on the reasons for such dreams and their consequences on the different charactersEnglis