US-Israel Collab: A structural and multiepistemic approach to modeling Brucella transmission along complex networks in Bedouin communities

Project Details

Description

OVERVIEW

One Health is an approach that considers human, animal, and environmental health to be connected to each other. This includes the spread of diseases between animals and humans, termed zoonoses. One Health is the ideal approach for solving some of the most difficult health threats facing our world, including infectious diseases common to poor livestock keepers, and new pandemics like COVID—’i9. However, One Health research, similar to research in the broader field of infectious disease epidemiology, tends to focus on the biological causes of health, ignoring the root “causes of causes": the political and historical structures and processes that cause socioec- onomic inequalities, which are instrumental to health. We have recently developed a new One Health approach, called Relational One Health, which provides a way to think about and under- stand these fundamental causes of causes of health in humans, animals, and ecosystems. Brucellosis is a bacterial disease that is highly infectious and causes chronic illness, leading to disability in humans and lost production in livestock. The goal of this project is to examine the political and historical causes of brucellosis transmission between animals and humans among Bedouin communities in southern Israel, specifically mistrust of public institutions, and compelled urbanization, using Relational One Health to design our approach and interpret our results. We will do this using an approach which embraces multiple forms of knowledge, including both academic expertise and traditional knowledge, combined with state—of—the—art microbiological and epidemiological methods.

INTELLECTUAL MERIT

Once it has been successfully completed, we expect this project to be a first step towards demonstrating how important macrosocial (political, historical, economic, etc.) factors are in the health of humans, animals, and ecosystems. This project will also help refine Relational One Health and provide other researchers with tools for harmonizing traditional knowledge with common approaches for collecting and analyzing scientific data. Finally, this project will develop new research methods for sequencing the genomes of Brucella bacteria and improving the accuracy of disease models.

BROADER IMPACTS

This project supports several important societal outcomes. We plan to host policy roundtables between Bedouin community leaders, Ministry of Health, and Ministry of Agriculture to develop community—identified solutions to build trust and reduce Brucella transmission. Second, our study design embraces multiple knowledge types, with significant involvement of Bedouin communities in the design and implementation of the research. This will increase public engagement with research and demonstrate to other researchers that non—academic knowledge is valid and important. Finally, the research questions this study addresses directly support the improved wellbeing of individuals in society, by reducing the burden ofdiseases through finding and addressing the “causes of causes” of health.

StatusFinished
Effective start/end date15/08/2031/08/21

Funding

  • United States-Israel Binational Science Foundation (BSF)

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