Integrating participatory approaches and traditional models to strengthen One Health responses to zoonotic diseases in India's changing environments

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Zoonotic pathogens, that circulate between animals and humans, like the Leishmaniases, and Nipah and Chikungunya viruses, cause 60% of emerging infectious disease events worldwide and disproportionately affect people in tropical, resource-poor areas. Aside from impairing human and animal health, zoonotic diseases are detrimental to livelihoods and economies, for example, preventing small-holder farmers being lifted out of poverty by increasing livestock production. The impacts of zoonotic diseases are increasing and shifting globally, as the environment and societies undergo rapid change. Our lack of knowledge on how these pathogens circulate between wildlife, livestock (as well as possible insect and tick vectors) and people, and how people are exposed as they use the landscape makes it difficult to understand these changes in terms of impact, and to develop effective disease control strategies in many local settings. Effective management and understanding of zoonotic diseases requires cooperation of policy-makers and managers from across the animal health, human health, agriculture and environment sectors, from national and international decision-makers down to district managers that all interact with the disease system, as advocated by the global One Health initiative, that recognises the "interconnectedness of human health, wildlife and domestic animal health and the environment". Surveillance, decisions and policy need to be better integrated across sectors, and research that leads to informatics to support management decisions, like maps and forecasts must be informed by the knowledge, priorities and needs of local disease managers and policy makers. More-over, neglected endemic pathogens that affect poor communities need to be better represented in policy frameworks and surveillance systems.Focussing in India as a key global hotspot for endemic and emerging zoonotic diseases and small-holder livestock communities, and bringing together a network of stakeholders with experts in public and animal health, ecology, epidemiology and social science, this project aims to reduce health, welfare and livelihood impacts of zoonotic diseases by better understanding links between surveillance, knowledge, research and models across sectors and improving current information systems that support intervention. The research underpinning these improvements will include:(1) Mapping of key stakeholders in each sector, their priorities and needs for decision-support tools (2) Identifying where surveillance data, knowledge and skills exist and could be leveraged across sectors to better understand and manage zoonotic diseases(3) Understanding the full range of potential socio-ecological drivers that might cause disease impacts to increase (4) Interpreting geographical patterns in disease impacts in relation to environmental data within models to disentangle social, climate and landscape factors precipitating disease for case-study diseases and settings and, in turn, predicting outcomes of intervention(5) Building capacity in research, data analysis and cross-sectoral collaboration to underpin future One Health approaches in India.Improved decision-support tools will help disease managers to better target vaccination and communication efforts towards the communities that are most at risk and help managers in agriculture and environmental sectors to understand how, for these communities, disease impacts may coincide with other negative impacts of environmental change. The project platform and approach of co-developing research and decision support tools on zoonotic diseases with stakeholders across sectors, accounting for their needs and underlying ecological and social processes, will build significant capacity in science, policy and practitioners to respond to these emerging and endemic global threats.