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

ArtsCorpsDetroit

Mid-American Session Proposal Community and Collaboration ArtsCorpsDetroit Creative industries provide direct economic benefits to communities by creating jobs, attracting investments, generating tax revenues, and stimulating local economies through tourism and consumer purchases. These industries provide an array of other benefits, such as infusing other industries with creative insight for their products and services and preparing workers to participate in the contemporary workforce. Because arts and culture enhance quality of life, they are an important complement to community development, enriching local amenities and attracting young professionals to an area. To ensure the long-term vitality of the cultural sector, urban areas such as metropolitan Detroit must develop and nurture programs that leverage human creative capital. Typically the arts have been defended on the basis of their economic impact on communities and on quality of life factors in terms of attracting people and businesses to arts-rich communities. A crucial factor, often overlooked, is the intrinsic transformative value of arts engagement in widening people\u27s view of creativity, action and engagement. In the proposed session ArtsCorpsDetroit will discuss strategies for building effective community partnerships to leverage human creative capital. Facilitated by ArtsCorpsDetroit, an initiative of Wayne State University and Tech Town, participants will hear from three differing perspectives, 1. higher education faculty members, 2. community partners, and 3. students who have engaged (collaboratively) on arts based community projects. Panelists will discuss the obstacles and benefits of “community and collaboration”. ArtsCorpsDetroit also will provide a bus tour of panelists’ projects to show Community and Collaboration “at-work”

Imperialist Internationalism, the Lithuanian Variant poster

http://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/61027/1/2302.pd

The Origins and Future of Sentinel: An Early-Warning System for Pandemic Preemption and Response

While investigating a signal of adaptive evolution in humans at the gene LARGE, we encountered an intriguing finding by Dr. Stefan Kunz that the gene plays a critical role in Lassa virus binding and entry. This led us to pursue field work to test our hypothesis that natural selection acting on LARGE—detected in the Yoruba population of Nigeria—conferred resistance to Lassa Fever in some West African populations. As we delved further, we conjectured that the “emerging” nature of recently discovered diseases like Lassa fever is related to a newfound capacity for detection, rather than a novel viral presence, and that humans have in fact been exposed to the viruses that cause such diseases for much longer than previously suspected. Dr. Stefan Kunz’s critical efforts not only laid the groundwork for this discovery, but also inspired and catalyzed a series of events that birthed Sentinel, an ambitious and large-scale pandemic prevention effort in West Africa. Sentinel aims to detect and characterize deadly pathogens before they spread across the globe, through implementation of its three fundamental pillars: Detect, Connect, and Empower. More specifically, Sentinel is designed to detect known and novel infections rapidly, connect and share information in real time to identify emerging threats, and empower the public health community to improve pandemic preparedness and response anywhere in the world. We are proud to dedicate this work to Stefan Kunz, and eagerly invite new collaborators, experts, and others to join us in our efforts