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对人类造成持续的压力。再加上它们的进化和适应，问题不在于是否会出现新的流行病，而在于何时以及如何发生。因此，我们必须确保尽量减少病原体出现和入侵的机会。为了了解并最终控制病原体的出现和传播方式，我们需要考虑一个复杂的系统，其中包括相互作用的生物、环境、经济和社会因素。迫切需要发展一个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，我们称之为附加系统。对病原体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。外系是动态的，易受干扰。随着环境、社会、经济、心理和生物因素的变化，认知结构可能会受到影响，以至于不再能够发挥作用。例如，随着全世界人口的预期增长，将有增加粮食供应的压力，导致从农场向人口蔓延的可能性增加。因此，我们需要了解强调外膜正常功能的机制，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。对社会生态系统而言，复原力是生态系统承受干扰的能力。我们建议扩展弹性的概念，以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，而社会的反应部分是由对健康、免疫力和风险的非专业看法驱动的。我们建议将生物学家、经济学家和社会科学家聚集在一起，用数学和统计建模提供一种共同的语言，在这种语言中，将建立模型并提出建议。

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.