Discovering environmental management opportunities for infectious disease control



Beltrame, Ludovica, Vineer, Hannah Rose ORCID: 0000-0002-1488-0315, Walker, Josephine G, Morgan, Eric R, Vickerman, Peter and Wagener, Thorsten
(2021) Discovering environmental management opportunities for infectious disease control. SCIENTIFIC REPORTS, 11 (1). 6442-.

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Abstract

Climate change and emerging drug resistance make the control of many infectious diseases increasingly challenging and diminish the exclusive reliance on drug treatment as sole solution to the problem. As disease transmission often depends on environmental conditions that can be modified, such modifications may become crucial to risk reduction if we can assess their potential benefit at policy-relevant scales. However, so far, the value of environmental management for this purpose has received little attention. Here, using the parasitic disease of fasciolosis in livestock in the UK as a case study, we demonstrate how mechanistic hydro-epidemiological modelling can be applied to understand disease risk drivers and the efficacy of environmental management across a large heterogeneous domain. Our results show how weather and other environmental characteristics interact to define disease transmission potential and reveal that environmental interventions such as risk avoidance management strategies can provide a valuable alternative or complement to current treatment-based control practice.

Item Type: Article
Uncontrolled Keywords: Animals, Cattle, Fasciola, Fascioliasis, Models, Statistical, Environment, Communicable Disease Control, Livestock, Hydrology
Divisions: Faculty of Health and Life Sciences
Faculty of Health and Life Sciences > Institute of Infection, Veterinary and Ecological Sciences
Depositing User: Symplectic Admin
Date Deposited: 21 Apr 2021 09:05
Last Modified: 18 Jan 2023 22:51
DOI: 10.1038/s41598-021-85250-1
Open Access URL: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-021-85250-1
Related URLs:
URI: https://livrepository.liverpool.ac.uk/id/eprint/3119930