Sources, Seasonality, Transmission and Control: Campylobacter and human behaviour in a changing environment

我们中很少有人会在一场腹泻后死去。但事实是腹泻病是致命的。它还可能导致长期的、使人衰弱的疾病，对我们的工业生产力产生不利影响，并从我们的卫生和社会服务中消耗大量财政资源。然而，导致这些潜在致命疾病的原因仍然是一个谜，尤其是因为迄今为止的研究主要集中在拼图的一个角落。我们的研究将改变这一点。许多引起腹泻的微生物自然存在于动物体内。有些很容易传染给人类，并设法适应并在新栖息地茁壮成长。这些生物在环境中大量存在，它们进入人体的途径不计其数。到目前为止，研究主要集中在被污染的食物或水作为潜在的疾病来源。迄今还没有人研究过人类在多大程度上串通造成了自己的不幸。是我们做了什么或没做什么使我们中的一些人比其他人更容易患这些疾病吗？我们的研究将来自广泛学科的专家联合起来，回答有关腹泻病病因和传播的这些问题和其他问题。我们将使用弯曲杆菌作为我们的案例研究，弯曲杆菌是发达国家最常见的引起腹泻的细菌。2010年，英国估计有70万弯曲杆菌病例。约200人死亡；其他人则患上了肠易激综合症、关节炎和瘫痪。英国每年仅急性弯曲杆菌感染的费用就高达6亿英镑，超过沙门氏菌、李斯特菌和大肠杆菌O157的总和。然而，我们仍然不知道一半的病例是如何产生的。约40%的病例发生在春季高峰期间。然而，对于环境中发生了什么，或者我们的食物供应发生了什么，或者我们自己的行为发生了什么，我们知之甚少。因此，我们的研究将调查和捕捉在不同的时间间隔、不同的地点和不同的时间段内，对我们、对我们的环境和社会发生的事情，这样我们就能了解所有这些因素是如何结合起来影响弯曲杆菌感染的。这种类型的分析将有利于未来研究社会和生态系统如何与跨越动物和人类物种边界的其他生物相互作用和影响。

Few of us would expect to die after a bout of diarrhoea. But the fact is that diarrhoeal disease kills. It can also lead to long-term, debilitating illnesses that adversely affect our industrial productivity and drain significant financial resource from our health and social services. Yet, much about what causes these potentially fatal diseases remains a mystery, not least because research to date has focused largely on one corner of the jigsaw. Our research will change this. Many of the organisms that cause diarrhoea occur naturally in animals. Some are easily transmitted to humans and have managed to adapt to - and thrive in - their new habitat. These organisms are abundant in the environment and there are countless ways for them to get into the human body. Until now, research has concentrated on contaminated food or water as the potential source of disease. No-one has yet studied the extent to which humans collude in their own misfortune. Is there something we do or fail to do that makes some of us more susceptible than others to these diseases? Our research unites experts from a wide variety of disciplines to answer these and other questions about what causes and spreads diarrhoeal disease. We will use Campylobacter spp, the most common bacterial cause of diarrhoea in the developed world, as our case study. In 2010, there were an estimated 700,000 cases of Campylobacter spp in the UK. Around 200 people died; others developed irritable bowel syndrome, arthritis and paralysis. The annual UK cost of acute Campylobacter infection alone tops #600 million, more than the cost of Salmonella, Listeria and E. coli O157 combined. Yet we still do not know how half the cases arose. About 40% of cases occur during the spring peak . Yet we know little if anything about what happens in the environment, or to our food supply, or to our own behaviour to cause this. So our research will investigate and capture what does happen - to us, to our environment and to society - at a number of different intervals, in a variety of locations and over a range of different time periods so we can understand how all these factors combine to influence Campylobacter infection. This type of analysis will benefit future research into how social and ecological systems interact with and affect other organisms that cross the species boundary between animals and people.