Journal
FRONTIERS IN PUBLIC HEALTH
Volume 10, Issue -, Pages -Publisher
FRONTIERS MEDIA SA
DOI: 10.3389/fpubh.2022.892366
Keywords
environmental control; DALYs; disease dynamics; human health; human-environment interaction
Categories
Funding
- Science for Nature and People Partnership (SNAPP)
- Wildlife Conservation Society
- National Center for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis (NCEAS) at the University of California, Santa Barbara
- National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship [1656518, 1611767]
- Stanford Data Science Scholars program
- Stanford Center for Computational, Evolutionary and Human Genomics (CEHG) Predoctoral Fellowship
- Philanthropic Educational Organization (P.E.O.) Scholar Award
- International Chapter of the P.E.O. Sisterhood
- James and Nancy Kelso Fellowship through the Stanford Interdisciplinary Graduate Fellowship program
- Nature Conservancy [1611767]
- National Science Foundation Postdoctoral Research Fellowship in Biology
- National Science Foundation
- Fogarty International Center [DEB-2032276, DEB-2011147]
- NSF [DEB 2011179]
- Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation [OPP1114050]
- Direct For Biological Sciences
- Div Of Biological Infrastructure [1611767] Funding Source: National Science Foundation
- Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation [OPP1114050] Funding Source: Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation
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Humans interact with parasites and pathogens in complex socio-ecological systems. Through a review of literature, it was found that nearly all infectious organisms spend time in reservoirs and can be transmitted to human hosts. Many infectious diseases are primarily controlled through environmental interventions.
Humans live in complex socio-ecological systems where we interact with parasites and pathogens that spend time in abiotic and biotic environmental reservoirs (e.g., water, air, soil, other vertebrate hosts, vectors, intermediate hosts). Through a synthesis of published literature, we reviewed the life cycles and environmental persistence of 150 parasites and pathogens tracked by the World Health Organization's Global Burden of Disease study. We used those data to derive the time spent in each component of a pathogen's life cycle, including total time spent in humans versus all environmental stages. We found that nearly all infectious organisms were environmentally mediated to some degree, meaning that they spend time in reservoirs and can be transmitted from those reservoirs to human hosts. Correspondingly, many infectious diseases were primarily controlled through environmental interventions (e.g., vector control, water sanitation), whereas few (14%) were primarily controlled by integrated methods (i.e., combining medical and environmental interventions). Data on critical life history attributes for most of the 150 parasites and pathogens were difficult to find and often uncertain, potentially hampering efforts to predict disease dynamics and model interactions between life cycle time scales and infection control strategies. We hope that this synthetic review and associated database serve as a resource for understanding both common patterns among parasites and pathogens and important variability and uncertainty regarding particular infectious diseases. These insights can be used to improve systems-based approaches for controlling environmentally mediated diseases of humans in an era where the environment is rapidly changing.
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