Study highlights one health challenges

A new study by the RVC has highlighted the challenges and implications for one health research – and the importance of including the social sciences in creating effective Government policy – to mitigate the spread of zoonotic diseases such as COVID-19.

The research, led by RVC social scientist Tony Barnett, analysed current limitations facing interdisciplinarity and the ability to achieve holistic understandings.

Human behaviour

The research also explored the separate interventions with regards to both human and animal health that fail to account for human behaviour in relation to the social sciences disciplines.

Results showed how and why social sciences should always be used to understand pandemics – both now and in the future.

Transfer

Prof Barnett, and teams from the RVC and Bangladesh, conducted long-term studies of poultry production and trading in Bangladesh, and are now undertaking additional studies in India, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka and Vietnam.

The aim is to identify how the social and economic relations of production, trading and retailing create niches, nodes and gradients that increase the likelihood of pathogen evolution towards increased virulence and likelihood of transfer to human beings – and, therefore, the possibility of development of pandemic spread.

Social process

Prof Barnett said: “It’s obvious, really – infection is above all a social process. It takes many different forms and responses to infection are also social.

“Ever since I did the first study of the effect of HIV/AIDS on rural communities in Africa in the late 1980s, and later studied the potential impact of pandemic influenza on the UK in 2007-8, I have been surprised at the way epidemic and pandemic response policy so often neglects social science inputs.

“The publication of this paper by a multinational research group in a veterinary journal indicates that the ground is shifting and interdisciplinary research on infection is now firmly on the agenda.”