PGR Policy, Strategy and Support

The Epidemiology & Economics of Zoonosis Control – One Health Approaches to Brucellosis Intervention Design & Evaluation

 

Keywords – One Health, Epidemiology, Economics, Zoonosis, Brucellosis, Tanzania, Infectious Diseases, Public Health, Health Economics, Health Sciences

Project Summary - Brucellosis is a zoonotic disease that has been effectively controlled in many countries but has major impacts on human and animal health in many resource-limited settings worldwide.  There is currently little evidence available to evaluate the likely epidemiological impacts, cost/benefit distributions or sustainability of alternative brucellosis intervention strategies, in northern Tanzania, where this project will be focused.  Knowledge gaps include key transmission parameters, the likely impacts of alternative control strategies and the quantifiable costs of disease to farmers, sick people and nations as a whole.  There is also a need to operationalize ‘One Health’ economic evaluation methods for such interventions. This project will develop novel One Health methods for identifying, measuring and valuing the costs and benefits of alternative approaches to brucellosis control, and estimate how costs and benefits are distributed across different stakeholders.  

Recognizing that zoonotic disease transmission risks depend on interactions of epidemiological factors and economic parameters the project objectives are to:

1) develop a set of “epi-economic” models which reflect the interdependence between economic and ecological processes and predict how different economic agents will respond to changes in external risk, management interventions, and the behaviour of other actors

2) develop estimates of the costs and benefits to society of alternative interventions and characterise the distribution and flow of these costs and benefits to different actors

3) identify the incentives needed to achieve sustainable control strategies.

The outcomes of this interdisciplinary project will have direct relevance to the development of control strategies for brucellosis in resource-limited settings.  The development of novel methodologies for evaluating disease interventions that span human and veterinary health disciplines will also have much wider applications to other diseases and systems.  

Project Team - This LKAS scholarship provides an opportunity for the successful applicant to engage in cutting edge interdisciplinary and impact driven research.  The project team combines expertise and experience in the disciplines of One Health epidemiology, environmental economics, health economics and multi-species disease ecology and will work to develop and apply innovative new approaches to One Health intervention development.   The supervisory team includes Dr Jo Halliday, Prof Nick Hanley and Prof Emma McIntosh. The successful candidate will be based at the Institute of Biodiversity, Animal Health and Comparative Medicine (https://www.gla.ac.uk/researchinstitutes/bahcm/), with opportunities for travel to Tanzania as part of the project.