US-israel collab: market integration, land use, and pathogen transmission

This Project Grant award from the National Science Foundation's Division of Mathematical Sciences, CFDA program 47.049 (Mathematical and Physical Sciences), supports research investigating how the transition from subsistence farming to cash crops impacts infectious disease transmission patterns in rural communities. The $500,000 award to Duke University's Office of Research Administration Division runs from July 1, 2023 through June 30, 2028.

The key products and services delivered under this grant include:

• Interdisciplinary research integrating ecology, anthropology, sociology, mathematics, infectious disease, and economics to understand how market integration, human movement patterns, and changes in small mammal populations and pathogens influence disease transmission;
• Development of new network science methods to predict disease outbreaks and regional transmission, as well as identify how human land use affects disease-carrying mammals and pathogens;
• Providing critical public health information to rural communities on infectious disease risks associated with the shift to cash crop farming;
• Training students in field ecology, social science, and network science;
• Building international research partnerships to enhance global health research.

The award also includes two sub-grants - one to the National University of Singapore to conduct viral antibody screening, and another to Colorado State University to analyze small mammal samples and identify endoparasites, viral communities, and population genetics. Dartmouth College's Office of Sponsored Projects is responsible for data analysis and modeling to quantify uncertainties in estimating infectious disease exposures in human networks.

Abstract

The shift from subsistence agriculture to farming cash crops modifies landscapes and lifestyles in ways that impact human health both positively and negatively, including through exposure to infectious diseases. This project studies infectious disease exposure in rural farmers transitioning to cash crops to understand how market integration influences human movement patterns, with implications for disease transmission within and between communities, and to investigate how farming influences the movement and abundance of small mammals, such as rats, that harbor infectious diseases that can spread to humans (zoonoses). The interdisciplinary research team brings together experts from ecology, evolutionary anthropology, sociology, mathematics, infectious diseases, environmental sciences, and economics. The project supports several broader impacts, which include student training in field ecology, social science, and network science; developing a new interdisciplinary team science workshop; and building international partnerships to enhance global health research. The research team also develops methods to understand disease outbreaks and regional transmission, identify how human land use affects mammals and their pathogens, and provide critical public health information to rural communities. The research investigates specific hypotheses for how market integration influences pathogen transmission locally, the market factors that amplify infectious disease risk regionally, and the specific agricultural activities that influence transmission at different scales in human and animal hosts. A strength of the research involves the integration of natural and social science approaches, including collection of socioeconomic and demographic data, and assembling ecological data on a wide array of zoonotic and human-specific infectious diseases. The team applies new link prediction methods to compensate for missing data, network methods from social sciences to identify epidemiological roles of different individuals, and social-ecological network approaches to investigate how human activities influence movement of small mammals and their pathogens. These networks can assess how recent and future land use change influences zoonotic disease transmission from small mammals into people and then within and across communities. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.