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

Spatial and temporal variation of amphibian assemblage at Kuala Gandah, Krau Wildlife Reserve, Pahang, Peninsular Malaysia

Recent global amphibian declines have emphasized the need for long-term, large scale monitoring programmes. Many factors have to be considered, including robust spatial sampling, duration and detectability when designing for such monitoring programmes. In this study, both active and passive sampling methods were used to increase detectability of animals. Habitat characteristics were also explored, which included disturbance history, vegetation type and microhabitat to explain species richness, relative abundance and community structure. The total species of anurans sampled from the pit-fall traps in this study was 17 species within five families, while the total of anuran species obtained from the active sampling along the rivers was 13 species from six families. The species richness could be explained significantly by two out of 10 environmental parameters measured; canopy cover and distance from forest trails, while the most abundant individuals sampled could only be explained significantly by the depth of leaf litter layer. From the cluster analysis, five main groups can be distinguished according to microhabitats, lifestyles and life cycles. Generally, disturbed habitats are characterised by widespread habitatgeneralists and/or human commensal taxa, whereas the riparian habitat and forests tend to be characterised by habitat-specialist taxa. The results of this study may assist scientists to determine trends in the selection of microhabitat by amphibians