Department of Civil Engineering, University of Bristol, Bristol, UK.
Department of Agricultural and Environmental Sciences, University of Milan, Milan, Italy.
Sci Rep. 2021 Mar 19;11(1):6442. doi: 10.1038/s41598-021-85250-1.
Climate change and emerging drug resistance make the control of many infectious diseases increasingly challenging and diminish the exclusive reliance on drug treatment as sole solution to the problem. As disease transmission often depends on environmental conditions that can be modified, such modifications may become crucial to risk reduction if we can assess their potential benefit at policy-relevant scales. However, so far, the value of environmental management for this purpose has received little attention. Here, using the parasitic disease of fasciolosis in livestock in the UK as a case study, we demonstrate how mechanistic hydro-epidemiological modelling can be applied to understand disease risk drivers and the efficacy of environmental management across a large heterogeneous domain. Our results show how weather and other environmental characteristics interact to define disease transmission potential and reveal that environmental interventions such as risk avoidance management strategies can provide a valuable alternative or complement to current treatment-based control practice.
气候变化和新出现的耐药性使许多传染病的控制变得越来越具有挑战性，并降低了将药物治疗作为解决问题的唯一方法的独特性。由于疾病传播往往取决于可以改变的环境条件，如果我们能够在相关政策尺度上评估其潜在益处，那么这种改变可能对降低风险至关重要。然而，到目前为止，环境管理在这方面的价值还没有得到太多关注。在这里，我们使用英国家畜的寄生性疾病 fasciolosis 作为案例研究，展示了如何应用机械水流行病学模型来理解疾病风险驱动因素和在大型异构域中进行环境管理的效果。我们的研究结果表明了天气和其他环境特征如何相互作用来定义疾病传播潜力，并揭示了风险规避管理策略等环境干预措施可以为当前基于治疗的控制实践提供有价值的替代或补充。
