19-EEID US-UK Anticipating dynamic responses to disease control interventions in reservoirs: the science of vampire bat rabies management

野生动物携带各种各样的病原体，这些病原体可以在宿主物种之间传播。包括埃博拉和COVID-19在内的此类疾病严重影响人类健康、农业和野生动物保护。从历史上看，疾病缓解方法（例如疫苗接种，治疗）一直专注于人类或牲畜，而不是在自然界中使病原体永久存在的野生动物。例如，我们在人类患上源自其他物种的疾病后进行治疗，而不是限制疾病在其动物源中的传播。在野生动物中控制疾病可能会更有效地控制疾病，但目前受到三个因素的限制。首先，许多疾病都维持在跨景观传播的周期中，但众所周知，野生动物很难在如此大的空间尺度上观察，这使得对干预措施的反应不可预测。其次，疫苗等工具很难对足够数量的人进行管理，以实际减少野外疾病传播。第三，干预措施通常受到社会制约因素的限制，无论是财政上的（例如，有限的资金投资）或社会学（例如，多个利益相关者之间的冲突）。该项目使用一种对健康和农业有重大影响的高度易处理的疾病作为模型系统，以确定如何克服野生动物疾病控制的每一个限制因素。该项目将进行实地和实验室研究，以测试有关吸血蝙蝠传播狂犬病的具体假设，这种病毒感染对整个拉丁美洲的人类健康和农业产生重大影响。这项研究将利用两个领域，其中新的工具和策略使人们对疾病传播和管理有了前所未有的了解：动物传播跟踪系统的小型化和可以在野生动物中传播的疫苗的开发。现场实验，使用动物传播的GPS标签，沿着与蝙蝠存在的问卷调查和历史狂犬病爆发的牛，将被用来生成一个空间上明确的动态模型蝙蝠的丰度和扩散。对圈养和野生吸血蝙蝠的研究将解决与实施针对蝙蝠的自我传播疗法有关的关键不确定性。最后，随机流行病学模型将使用从实地调查和圈养研究和蝙蝠种群动态模型估计的参数，以确定最佳的干预策略，用于局部控制和区域消除吸血蝙蝠狂犬病，以保护不同的利益相关者的要求（例如野生动物保护目标以及改善人类和牲畜的健康）。更广泛的影响：这项研究是朝着预防性管理一种重要的蝙蝠病毒迈出的一步，同时加强了国际研究能力。在这样做的过程中，它将创建可推广的定量框架，这将有助于告知如何将潜在的革命性技术应用于其他野生动物疾病。

Wild animals host a wide variety of pathogens that can spread between host species. Such diseases, including Ebola and COVID-19, significantly affect human health, agriculture and wildlife conservation. Historically, disease mitigation methods (e.g. vaccination, therapeutics) have focused on humans or livestock rather than the wild animals that perpetuate the pathogens in nature. For example, we treat humans after they become ill from a disease that originated in other species, rather than limiting the spread of the disease within its animal source. Controlling diseases within wildlife could be more effective in controlling disease but is currently limited by three factors. First, many diseases are maintained in cycles that spread across landscapes, but wildlife are notoriously difficult to observe at these large spatial scales, making responses to interventions unpredictable. Second, tools like vaccines have been difficult to administer to sufficient numbers of individuals to actually reduce disease transmission in the wild. Third, interventions are usually bounded by societal constraints, whether financial (e.g., limited funds to invest) or sociological (e.g., conflicting desires among multiple stakeholders). This project uses a highly tractable disease that has major health and agricultural impacts as a model system to determine how each limiting factor for disease control in wildlife can be overcome. The project will conduct field and laboratory research to test specific hypotheses about vampire bat-transmitted rabies, a viral infection that has major human health and agricultural impacts across Latin America. The study will take advantage of two areas where novel tools and strategies enable unprecedented insights into disease spread and management: the miniaturization of animal-borne tracking systems and the development of vaccines that can spread among wildlife in the wild. Field experiments using animal-borne GPS tags, along with landscape-scale data on bat presence from questionnaires and historical rabies outbreaks in cattle, will be used to generate a spatially-explicit dynamic model of bat abundance and dispersal. Studies on captive and wild vampire bats will resolve key uncertainties related to the implementation of self-spreading therapies that target bats. Finally, stochastic epidemiological models will use parameters estimated from fieldwork and captive studies and the bat population dynamic model to identify optimal intervention strategies for localized control and regional elimination of vampire bat rabies that preserve diverse stakeholder requirements (e.g. wildlife conservation goals as well as improved human and livestock health). Broader impacts: This research constitutes a step towards preventative management of an important bat virus while strengthening international research capacity. In doing so, it will create generalizable quantitative frameworks that will be useful to inform how potentially revolutionary technologies could be applied to other wildlife diseases.