Disease transmission along complex human-animal networks: a novel method for improving zoonotic disease modeling (CHAIN Study, Meisner, PI)
Diseases are spread between animals and humans every day: while sometimes this causes large outbreaks or even pandemics, such as the 2013-2015 outbreak of Ebola in West Africa, or the 2019 emergence of SARS-CoV-2, most of the time these are endemic zoonoses that are constantly maintained in human and animal populations. Epidemiologists have been using a modeling technique called network analysis for a long time to study how diseases are spread between humans, but these have not been extended to study the transmission between animals and humans. The CHAIN project (Complex Human-Animal transmission Networks) is a 5 year, NIH-funded project which will develop tools to measure and model human-livestock contact networks among rural herders in Mongolia, and test whether the added complexity of a network approach gives more useful insights than simpler modeling strategies.
US-Israel Collab: A structural and multiepistemic approach to modeling Brucella transmission along complex networks in Bedouin communities (BRUCE Study, Meisner, PI)
Brucellosis is a bacterial illness that livestock (especially sheep, goats, camels, and cattle) give to humans, causing chronic illness, infertility, and pregnancy losses. Controlling the disease involves repeated vaccination, testing, and slaughter programs that require strong relationships between livestock owners and public health institutions. In collaboration with Bedouin communities in the Negev/Naqab desert, the BRUCE project will use a combination of oral histories, network and epidemic modeling, and metagenomic analysis to study how institutional distrust and urbanization influence the persistence of brucellosis in Israel and Palestine.