September 29, 2012
The National Science
Foundation (NSF), the
National Institutes of Health (NIH),
and other US and UK agencies are joining forces to determine whether or not
human-induced changes to the environment have played a role in the spread of
West Nile virus, Lyme disease and other ailments.
The NSF, the NIH’s Ecology and
Evolution of Infectious Diseases (EEID) program, the USDA’s National Institute
of Food and Agriculture (NIFA)
and the UK’s Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council (BBSRC) are
among the organizations studying the possible ecological and biological
mechanisms that could be at least partially responsible for the increased
number of cases of infectious
diseases spreading in both people and animals.
“Threats to human
health, food security and ecosystem services are growing, in
part due to increases in the spread of diseases,” Sam Scheiner, the NSF’s EEID
program director, said in a statement Thursday. “These research projects will
provide a new understanding of the causes of that spread and help us control
these growing and myriad threats.”
“The interdisciplinary
collaborations fostered by the EEID program promote a deeper understanding of
how infectious diseases emerge and spread,” added Irene Eckstrand of the NIH’s
National Institute of General Medical Sciences. “This knowledge is enormously
helpful in developing effective strategies for suppressing the transmission of
infectious agents in animal populations and reducing the burden of disease in
humans.”
Twelve grants worth a combined
$12.7 million have been awarded, and the projects that are being funded will
allow scientists to investigate how habitat destruction, invasive species,
pollution and other large-scale environmental factors might have contributed to
the prevalence of disease-causing viruses, bacterium and parasites in both
people and in various animal species, the NSF said in their September 27
statement.
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