Dynamic Drivers of Disease in Africa: Ecosystems, livestock/wildlife, health and wellbeing

健康是人类福祉的一个重要方面，与物质和社会关系相互作用，促进人们的自由和选择。特别是在非洲，一系列健康和疾病问题对穷人的影响尤为严重。健康的生态系统和健康的人是相辅相成的，但人们对它们之间的确切关系仍然知之甚少。非洲疾病动态驱动因素联合会将围绕生态系统-健康-福祉相互作用提供新的理论概念、综合系统分析和证据基础，并与预测模型和情景、工具和方法、影响途径和能力建设活动相联系，以在非洲实施“一个健康”议程。然而，它们也会对生态系统造成“损害”，例如成为野生动物新“出现”传染病的储存库。事实上，60%影响人类的新发传染病源自动物，包括家养和野生动物。这些人畜共患病对世界各地的人类社会有着巨大的潜在影响，影响到当代和后代。了解疾病发生和传播的生态、社会和经济条件是当今人类面临的主要挑战之一。我们假设，疾病调控作为一种生态系统服务，受到生物多样性、气候和土地利用变化的影响，对人们的健康和福祉产生不同的影响。该联合会将研究这一假说与四种疾病的关系，每种疾病都以不同方式受到生态系统变化的影响，对野生动物和牲畜宿主的依赖性不同，对人及其健康和生计的影响也不同。这些病例是塞拉利昂的拉沙热、加纳的亨尼帕病毒、肯尼亚的裂谷热以及赞比亚和津巴布韦的锥虫病。通过这些案例，我们将比较研究非洲各地不同环境中通过生态系统服务进行疾病调控的过程。这些案例位于非洲不同的生态系统类型中，从加纳的潮湿森林到塞拉利昂的森林-稀树草原过渡，再到赞比亚和津巴布韦的树木繁茂的miombo稀树草原以及肯尼亚的半干旱稀树草原。由于生态系统结构、功能和动态的对比，这些案例使人们能够对一系列环境变化过程进行比较探索，这些生态系统代表了非洲的一些主要生态系统类型。它们还允许从农业扩张和商业化，野生动物保护和利用，定居和城市化，采矿和冲突等方面对生态系统变化的关键政治经济和社会驱动因素进行比较调查。了解生态系统变化、疾病调控和人类福祉之间的相互作用必然是一个跨学科的挑战。该联合会汇集了研究环境变化和生态系统服务、社会经济、贫困和福祉问题以及健康和疾病的主要自然和社会科学专家。它将通过研究和政策/执行机构之间的新伙伴关系开展工作，以建立新型能力，并确保产生影响的持续途径。在所有五个非洲国家，这些小组都有环境、社会和卫生科学家参加，是大学研究人员和政府执行/政策机构之间的伙伴关系。该联盟还将爱丁堡大学、剑桥传染病联盟和动物学研究所聚集在一起，支持一系列与综合案例研究工作有关的交叉主题（支持疾病动态和变化驱动因素方面的工作）;国际传染病研究所（生态系统、健康和福祉方面）; STEPS中心、苏塞克斯大学（政治和价值观）和斯德哥尔摩复原力中心（机构、政策和未来情景）。

Health is a critical aspect of human wellbeing, interacting with material and social relations to contribute to people's freedoms and choices. Especially in Africa, clusters of health and disease problems disproportionately affect poor people. Healthy ecosystems and healthy people go together, yet the precise relationships between these remain poorly understood. The Dynamic Drivers of Disease in Africa Consortium will provide a new theoretical conceptualisation, integrated systems analysis and evidence base around ecosystem-health-wellbeing interactions, linked to predictive models and scenarios, tools and methods, pathways to impact and capacity-building activities geared to operationalising a 'One Health' agenda in African settings.Ecosystems may improve human wellbeing through provisioning and disease regulating services; yet they can also generate ecosystem 'disservices' such as acting as a reservoir for new 'emerging' infectious disease from wildlife. Indeed 60% of emerging infectious diseases affecting humans originate from animals, both domestic and wild. These zoonoses have a huge potential impact on human societies across the world, affecting both current and future generations. Understanding the ecological, social and economic conditions for disease emergence and transmission represents one of the major challenges for humankind today.We hypothesise that disease regulation as an ecosystem service is affected by changes in biodiversity, climate and land use, with differential impacts on people's health and wellbeing. The Consortium will investigate this hypothesis in relation to four diseases, each affected in different ways by ecosystem change, different dependencies on wildlife and livestock hosts, with diverse impacts on people, their health and their livelihoods. The cases are Lassa fever in Sierra Leone, henipaviruses in Ghana, Rift Valley Fever in Kenya and trypanosomiasis in Zambia and Zimbabwe. Through the cases we will examine comparatively the processes of disease regulation through ecosystem services in diverse settings across Africa. The cases are located in a range of different Africa ecosystem types, from humid forest in Ghana through forest-savanna transition in Sierra Leone to wooded miombo savanna in Zambia and Zimbabwe and semi-arid savanna in Kenya. These cases enable a comparative exploration of a range of environmental change processes, due to contrasting ecosystem structure, function and dynamics, representative of some of the major ecosystem types in Africa. They also allow for a comparative investigation of key political-economic and social drivers of ecosystem change from agricultural expansion and commercialisation, wildlife conservation and use, settlement and urbanisation, mining and conflict, among others. Understanding the interactions between ecosystem change, disease regulation and human wellbeing is necessarily an interdisciplinary challenge. The Consortium brings together leading natural and social scientific experts in the study of environmental change and ecosystem services; socio-economic, poverty and wellbeing issues, and health and disease. It will work through new partnerships between research and policy/implementing agencies, to build new kinds of capacity and ensure sustained pathways to impact. In all five African countries, the teams involve environmental, social and health scientists, forged as a partnership between university-based researchers and government implementing/policy agencies. Supporting a series of cross-cutting themes, linked to integrated case study work, the Consortium also brings together the University of Edinburgh, the Cambridge Infectious Diseases Consortium and Institute of Zoology (supporting work on disease dynamics and drivers of change); ILRI (ecosystem, health and wellbeing contexts); the STEPS Centre, University of Sussex (politics and values), and the Stockholm Resilience Centre (institutions, policy and future scenarios).