Investigating the Spread of Infectious Diseases With NSF, NIH, U.K. Funding

How diseases are transmitted among humans, other animals, the environment is focus.

New research aimed at controlling the transmission of diseases among humans, other animals and the environment is being made possible by grants from a collaboration among U.S. and U.K. funding agencies.

By improving our understanding of the factors affecting disease transmission, the projects will help produce models to predict and control outbreaks. Funding is from the U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF) and U.S. National Institutes of Health (NIH) Ecology and Evolution of Infectious Disease (EEID) Program. It is also being provided by the U.K. Ecology of Infectious Diseases Initiative of the Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council (BBSRC), and U.K. Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC).

Among the systems being studied is SOD:

Title: Interacting disturbances: leaf to landscape dynamics of emerging disease, fire and drought in California coastal forests
PI: David Rizzo, University of California - Davis

Summary: This research aims to better understand how the interaction of multiple factors like wildfire, drought, biodiversity and nutrient cycles can interact to regulate disease dynamics. Using long-term studies of sudden oak death, estimated to have killed millions of trees in the western U.S., scientists hope to gain new insights about how the emergence, persistence and spread of a pathogen is controlled by environmental disturbance.