Lay perceptions, prejudice and the natural environment in the spread of animal-human and human-human infections

Infection between animals and humans, and infection spread between humans, provides a major challenge to the health of societies across the world. In our work we bring together a variety of scientists and researchers from a range disciplines, alongside some of those most affected by this disease threat (including those running major sporting venues, the transport industry, and petting zoos). This unique team will then work together to produce the groundwork for a major research application on understanding infection spread, and potential aways in which infection risk can be best managed.

New and evolving infectious diseases pose novel challenges to increasingly mobile populations. This creates a need to understand and model both the biological processes involved but also the social and environmental processes that influence animal-human and human-human interaction and infection threat. We will establish a new multi-disciplinary network of researchers from psychology, economics, epidemiology, biology, mathematical modelling and engineering, alongside government scientists and key end users from the transport industry, a sporting venue, a city farm and a health NGO. We develop this network through a series of bilateral and group meetings / workshops, break-out writing groups , and complement this with expert summary reports and web-based collaborative writing. This will thus prepare us for a larger multi-disciplinary application on the environmental and social ecology of human infectious diseases.