Environmental and Social Ecology of Infectious Diseases of Humans, ESEI

The original project is now closed; for any details of notes and publications, please contact info@episystem.net

Joint initiative of University of Stirling, University of Glasgow, Heriot-Watt University, University of Sussex and University of York, together with CEFAS, HPS, IAH and VLA.

A 2006 Foresight Report on infectious disease concluded that 75% of all diseases emerging during the last two decades have been zoonoses, listing them as one of eight important areas of future disease, with 'the risk that zoonotic infection [rates] could increase in the future'. In the five years since then, policy-makers have faced pandemics involving novel strains of swine flu, avian influenza and increases in associated threats, such as anti-microbial resistance. Avoiding and responding to each future pandemic, and developing new vaccines, presents unprecedented challenges to conventional health and veterinary practices. The New Variant CJD crisis of the late 1990s demonstrated the burdens on public finance, the food industry and health infrastructure that will arise from a failure to confront zoonoses in the UK. The development of models in hindsight, using data from case-by-case studies undertaken in a single discipline, offer little prospect of identifying the causal factors common to different outbreaks. A new paradigm for understanding zoonotic disease is required. Our Episystem project provides this by developing a framework for whole-system models that expand and formalise the 'one world, one health' strategy, enabling their deployment in the re-thinking of prevention and control strategies.

The Episystem initiative will synthesise cutting-edge research insights from natural sciences, mathematics, economics, marketing, social and public health research. It will draw from the perspectives and meet the needs of multiple stakeholders in the food and agriculture system. The approach will allow a new generation of models to be built upon a balanced consideration of the biological, economic, and social factors that together determine the resilience of biological and social systems to incursions by infectious agents.