Food security and emerging infectious disease: risk assessment and risk management

Abstract

Climate change, emerging infectious diseases (EIDs) and food security create a dangerous nexus. Habitat interfaces, assumed to be efficient buffers, are being disrupted by human activities which in turn accelerate the movement of pathogens. EIDs threaten directly and indirectly availability and access to nutritious food, affecting global security and human health. In the next 70 years, food-secure and food-insecure countries will face EIDs driving increasingly unsustainable costs of production, predicted to exceed national and global gross domestic products. Our modern challenge is to transform this business as usual and embrace an alternative vision of the biosphere formalized in the Stockholm paradigm (SP). First, a pathogen-centric focus shifts our vision of risk space , determining how pathogens circulate in realized and potential fitness space. Risk space and pathogen exchange are always heightened at habitat interfaces. Second, apply the document-assess-monitor-act (DAMA) protocol developing strategic data for EID risk, to be translated, synthesized and broadcast as actionable information. Risk management is realized through targeted interventions focused around information exchanged among a community of scientists, policy practitioners of food and public health security and local populations. Ultimately, SP and DAMA protect human rights, supporting food security, access to nutritious food, health interventions and environmental integrity.

Landscape Composition Affects Elements of Metacommunity Structure for Culicidae Across South-Eastern Illinois

“…The main thrust is to use a holistic method to consider the links among human, plant, animal health and the environment, with a focus on understanding how anthropogenic pressures on the environment (e.g., land use change or urbanization) shape the threat of EIDs. A recent formalized strategic protocol (DAMA, Document-Assess-Monitor-Act) to prevent EIDs proposed actionable information to anticipate outbreaks ( 59 ), and assessing the risk space requires the evaluation of the interfaces among landscape types ( 17 ). In the context of mosquito-borne diseases, information about the influence of landscape type on community composition and the prevalence of mosquito species of particular interest are of pivotal importance to predict emergence and spread of zoonotic diseases.…”

“…Questions that remain are for instance whether competition for resources in such urban environments negatively affects other mosquito species, and thereby shifts or changes the assemblage as this species invades. Information on species assemblages and how they change with land use inform potential risk assessments [e.g., ( 17 )] for introductions of novel pathogens or (re-) emergence of diseases, and we recommend that such assessments of mosquito species assemblages and diversity be considered within One Health surveillance approaches.…”

“…Mosquito and arbovirus surveillance programs are a valuable tool to track viruses and define the risks for emerging diseases or increased virulence and persistence ( 15 ), and can benefit from being designed around an approach that targets the mosquito community as a whole ( 16 , 17 ), including alien invasive species. However, the prevailing paradigm has historically been focused on single species of interest ( 18 – 20 ), posing challenges to implementing such programs ( 21 ).…”

Ecological super‐spreaders drive host–range oscillations: Omicron and risk space for emerging infectious disease

“…This explains why traditional approaches for coping with EID have failed. Responding only after the fact for any emergence, no matter how rapidly, is ultimately ineffective and unsustainably costly (Brooks et al., 2021 , 2019 ; Trivellone et al., 2022 ). Even adequately managed EIDs may recycle in the risk space and re‐emerge as distinct lineages with unique epidemiological features.…”

“…Novel and previously recognized pathogens emerging in humans, crops and livestock cause costly epidemics in many parts of the planet (Brooks et al., 2019 ; Fauci & Morens, 2012 ; Morens et al., 2004 ; Trivellone et al., 2022 ). The recent COVID‐19 outbreak has reached pandemic proportions, challenging understanding of the eco‐evolutionary dynamics of pathogens and the way health systems cope with emerging infectious diseases (EIDs).…”