EPISYSTEM: Designing biological, social and economic environments to enhance resistance to zoonotic outbreaks

牲畜、野生动物和环境宿主中的病原体不断对人类施加压力。再加上它们的进化和适应，问题不在于新的流行病是否会出现，而在于它何时以及如何发生。因此，我们必须确保将病原体出现和入侵的机会降至最低。为了理解并最终控制病原体出现和传播的方式，我们需要考虑生物、环境、经济和社会因素相互作用的复杂系统。迫切需要发展一种类似于生态学中社会生态系统方法的这种系统的整体理论。与生态系统类似，我们称之为系统。一个系统的关键要求是它能够减轻病原体的出现、入侵、传播和持续存在。系统是动态的，容易受到干扰。随着环境、社会、经济、心理和生物因素的变化，生态系统的结构可能会受到影响，以至于不再能够发挥作用。例如，随着预计全球人口的增加，将会有增加粮食供应的压力，导致从农场到人口的溢出效应的可能性增加。因此，我们需要了解强调系统正常运作的机制，并设计其结构，使其即使在变化的条件下也能继续抑制病原体。对于社会生态系统，复原力表征了生态系统容忍干扰的能力。我们建议将恢复力的概念扩展到研究社会生态系统对病原体溢出和传播的反应。面对流行病风险和潜在的经济损失，我们还需要协调人们的行动的方法，而社会的反应部分是由世俗对健康、免疫和风险的看法驱动的。我们建议将生物学家、经济学家和社会科学家聚集在一起，进行数学和统计建模，为构建模型和提出建议提供一种共同的语言。

Pathogens in their livestock, wildlife and environmental hosts exert a constant pressure on the human population. Coupled with their evolution and adaptation, the matter is not so much whether a new epidemic will emerge, but when and how it will happen. We must therefore ensure that the chances of emergence and invasion of pathogens are minimised. To understand and eventually control the ways pathogens emerge and spread we need to consider a complex system of interacting biological, environmental, economic and social factors. There is a pressing need to develop a holistic theory of such systems analogous to the social-ecological systems approach in ecology. By analogy to ecosystems we call them episystems. The key requirement of an episystem is its ability to mitigate emergence, invasion, spread and persistence of pathogens. Episystems are dynamic and subject to disturbances. As the environmental, social, economical, psychological and biological factors change, the structure of the episystem may be affected to the point when it is not longer able to function. For example, with an anticipated increase in human population, worldwide, there will be pressures to increase food supply, leading to an increased possibility of spillover from farm to human population. We therefore need to understand mechanisms underlining proper functioning of the episystem and to design its structure so that it continues to suppress pathogens even under changed conditions. For social-ecological systems, resilience characterises the capacity of an ecosystem to tolerate disturbance. We propose to extend the concept of resilience to study the response of socio-ecological systems to pathogen spillover and spread. We also need ways to coordinate people s actions in face of epidemic risk and potential economic losses, while the response of the society is partially driven by lay perceptions of health, immunity and risk. We propose to bring together biologists, economists and social scientists with mathematical and statistical modelling providing a common language in which models will be framed and recommendations produced.