Animal Determinants of Emerging Infectious Disease

2003 Research Unit Award

This unit’s goal is to improve understanding and ability to address the emergence of infectious diseases such as West Nile virus that are passed to humans by interaction with an animal host (such as mosquitos in the case of West Nile). The unit will focus on gathering sound evidence of the origins of such diseases in animal/environmental systems as a basis for developing effective, evidence-based disease prevention and control plans.

Common to many of the emerging diseases of the past two decades have been changes in animal production, patterns of wildlife populations and food distribution systems. Clarifying the connection between spongiform encephalopathy in cattle and Creutzfeldt-Jacob disease in people, and linking hantavirus pulmonary disease with rodent populations or West Nile virus with mosquitoes illustrate how major public health issues have their origins in veterinary medicine and ecology – fields that are rarely part of public health research in Canada. This multidisciplinary unit will integrate animal ecology and veterinary medicine with medical microbiology and public health expertise to focus on non-human determinants of disease emergence. By integrating cross-species data to develop a fuller understanding of the role of animals in emerging infectious diseases, unit researchers will provide decision makers with a firmer foundation on which to build evidence-based disease prevention and control plans that involve complex human-animal-environment systems.

Located in Nanaimo BC, the Centre for Coastal Health is an independent, non-profit health research organization with connections to the University of British Columbia, the BC Centre for Disease Control and two of Canada’s four Colleges of Veterinary Medicine. With MSFHR unit funding, the centre’s goal is to develop the academic culture, scientific methods and public health data that will effectively and regularly integrate research on animal determinants into the public health response to emerging disease threats. Their plan has four interlinked components:

• Foster regular exchange of information between animal and human health researchers for more efficient application of existing knowledge and expertise.
• Develop better methods of detecting and monitoring changing patterns of animal health in order to study their role in disease emergence.
• Clarify how animal health determinants link to human health outcomes by investigating how pathogens and parasites are transmitted between humans and animals. This includes a better understanding of the role of animal management practices in food-borne diseases and the ways humans may be exposed to new pathogens through ecological changes resulting from human encroachment (e.g. agriculture, forestry) into previously remote or unsettled areas.
• Determine the predictive capacity of various animal data for public health purposes through applied surveillance projects and the development of predictive models incorporating new models of risk assessment and infectious disease ecology.

Completed award term September 2009.

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