A planetary health solution for disease, sustainability, food, water, and poverty challenges
Year: 2022
Type: preprint
Study design: Clinical Trial
Abstract: Global health and development communities lack sustainable, cost-effective, mutually beneficial solutions for infectious disease, food, water, and poverty challenges despite their regular interdependence worldwide 1–7 . Here, we show that agricultural development and fertilizer use in west Africa increase the devastating tropical disease schistosomiasis by fueling the growth of submerged aquatic vegetation that chokes out water access points and serves as habitat for snails that transmit Schistosoma parasites to >200 million people globally 8–10 . In a randomized control trial where we removed invasive submerged vegetation from water points, control sites had 124% higher fecal Schistosoma reinfection rates in schoolchildren and lower open water access than removal sites without any detectable long-term adverse effects of the removal on local water quality or freshwater biodiversity. The removed vegetation was as effective as traditional livestock feed but 41-179 times cheaper and converting the vegetation to compost yielded private crop production and total (public health plus private benefits) benefit-to-cost ratios as high as 4.0 and 8.8, respectively. Thus, we provide an economic incentive – with important public health co-benefits – to maintain cleared waterways and return nutrients captured in aquatic plants back to agriculture with great promise of breaking poverty-disease traps. To facilitate targeting and scaling of this intervention, we lay the foundation for using remote sensing technology to detect snail habitat. By offering a rare, profitable, win-win innovation for food and water access, poverty, infectious disease emergence, and environmental sustainability, we hope to inspire the interdisciplinary search for other planetary health solutions 11 to the numerous and formidable, co-dependent global grand challenges of the 21st century.
Source: medRxiv
Authors: Jason R Rohr, Sidy Bakhoum, Christopher B Barrett, Andrew J Chamberlin, David J Civitello, Molly J Doruska, Giulio A De Leo, Christopher J E Haggerty, Isabel Jones, Nicolas Jouanard, Amadou T. Ly, Raphael A Ndione, Justin V Remais, Gilles Riveau, Alexandra Sack, Anne-Marie Schacht, Simon Senghor, Susanne H Sokolow, Caitlin Wolfe
Institutions: University of Notre Dame, Cheikh Anta Diop University, Cornell University, Hopkins Marine Station, Stanford University, Emory University, Espoir pour la Sante, University of California System, University of California, Berkeley, Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, Inserm, Institut Pasteur de Lille, Centre Hospitalier Universitaire de Lille, Center for Infection and Immunity of Lille, University of South Florida
Language: English
Subfield: Parasitology
Field: Immunology and Microbiology
Domain: Life Sciences
Open Access status: green
Awards: G112169164, EID Disease in complex communities how multi-host multi-pathogen intreactions, Effects of agricultural expansion and intensification on infections, Analytical methods for estimating the joint climatological-social drivers of water quality and supply in contrasting tropical zones: Ecuador and China, Analytical methods for estimating the joint climatological-social drivers of water quality and supply in contrasting tropical zones: Ecuador and China, The Influence of Temporal and Spatial Scales on Drivers of Host-Parasite Interactions, G4377207418, CNH: The Coupled Human Health and Environmental Dynamics of Schistosomiasis, Collaborative Proposal: MRA: Using NEON data to elucidate the ecological effects of global environmental change on phenology across time and space, G5159530824, Identifying local-to-global "win-win" solutions for human health and sustainability through infectious disease control, G8648232956, G8928835126
OpenAlex ID: W4289688052