Identifying local-to-global "win-win" solutions for human health and sustainability through infectious disease control

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The unprecedented rate of infectious disease emergence, the need to feed 11 billion people by 2100, widespread poverty, and rapid degradation of the environment represent some of the most formidable ecological and public health problems of the 21st century. Because health often drives policies across the globe and is regularly linked to ecology, it can be a vital lever for securing a sustainable future for the developing world, where disease, poverty, and human population growth are most rampant, and resources to address these issues are most limited. The research team investigates how disease control strategies at local-to-global scales benefit human and environmental health. This study builds on the facts that part of every calorie that the more than 1.5 billion worm-infected humans on the planet consume is wasted on feeding or combating these worms, that mass drug administration (MDA) to treat worm infections is cheap and cost-effective, and that fertilizers that wash off an agricultural field fuel waterborne worm infections and reduce water quality. Reducing food wasted on parasitic worms would provide more food for humans and reduce the conversion of natural areas to agriculture, simultaneously mitigating disease, hunger, poverty, climate change, and ecosystem service deficits. Specifically, the research team tests the efficacy of controlling the disease schistosomiasis by removing aquatic vegetation that harbors the snails that are the source of the worms that infect humans. The fieldwork is carried out in Senegal and serves as a prototype for how the management of infectious diseases can promote sustainability across the planet. This project is transformative because it innovatively integrates principles of ecology, disease biology, and socio-economics to develop mitigation strategies and policy recommendations to address global ecological and public health problems. The project provides research opportunities for a postdoctoral researcher and undergraduate and graduate students, including individuals from underserved groups, and it promotes international collaboration with scientists in Senegal. The first aim of this project is to conduct a global bioeconomic analysis to holistically quantify the substantial economic benefits of MDA to treat human helminths, which, in turn, should more widely promote the use of MDA to reduce not only disease but also undernutrition, poverty, and environmental harm. The second aim of this project is to use randomized control clinical trials to evaluate whether harvesting aquatic vegetation and using it as compost, livestock feed, or fuel for gas-producing biodigesters will decrease human waterborne diseases and poverty, reduce water pollution by recycling nitrogen and phosphorous captured in the plants, and increase profits, open water access, and food and energy production. The third aim of this project is to begin to integrate, translate, and scale these innovations using remote sensing technology to map the abundance of aquatic vegetation and village remoteness. The bioeconomic experimental and mathematical approaches used in this project are general in their construction, offering broad generalizability of the theoretical aspects of this project beyond the specific parasites and locations of empirical work. This allows the project to serve as a blueprint for how to i) disrupt poverty-disease traps, ii) design and test incentives for community-led maintenance of public health benefits, iii) predict the effects of environmental change on the transmission of other parasites, and importantly, iv) synergistically integrate socio-economic and environmental systems to develop innovations that simultaneously improve human health and sustainability. The results from this study will be disseminated through peer-reviewed publications, a public seminar series in the U.S. and Senegal, and workshops at Senegalese research centers.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.