Award Abstract # 2109293
Identifying local-to-global "win-win" solutions for human health and sustainability through infectious disease control

NSF Org: DEB
Division Of Environmental Biology
Recipient: UNIVERSITY OF NOTRE DAME DU LAC
Initial Amendment Date: July 20, 2021
Latest Amendment Date: January 29, 2024
Award Number: 2109293
Award Instrument: Standard Grant
Program Manager: Colette St. Mary
cstmary@nsf.gov
 (703)292-4332
DEB
 Division Of Environmental Biology
BIO
 Directorate for Biological Sciences
Start Date: July 1, 2021
End Date: June 30, 2026 (Estimated)
Total Intended Award Amount: $2,500,000.00
Total Awarded Amount to Date: $2,500,000.00
Funds Obligated to Date: FY 2021 = $2,500,000.00
History of Investigator:
  • Jason Rohr (Principal Investigator)
    jasonrohr@gmail.com
  • Alex Perkins (Co-Principal Investigator)
Recipient Sponsored Research Office: University of Notre Dame
940 GRACE HALL
NOTRE DAME
IN  US  46556-5708
(574)631-7432
Sponsor Congressional District: 02
Primary Place of Performance: University of Notre Dame
940 Grace Hall
Notre Dame
IN  US  46556-5708
Primary Place of Performance
Congressional District:
02
Unique Entity Identifier (UEI): FPU6XGFXMBE9
Parent UEI: FPU6XGFXMBE9
NSF Program(s): Ecology of Infectious Diseases
Primary Program Source: 01002122DB NSF RESEARCH & RELATED ACTIVIT
01002122RB NSF RESEARCH & RELATED ACTIVIT
Program Reference Code(s): 7242, 9251
Program Element Code(s): 724200
Award Agency Code: 4900
Fund Agency Code: 4900
Assistance Listing Number(s): 47.074

ABSTRACT

The unprecedented rate of infectious disease emergence, the need to feed 11 billion people by 2100, widespread poverty, and rapid degradation of the environment represent some of the most formidable ecological and public health problems of the 21st century. Because health often drives policies across the globe and is regularly linked to ecology, it can be a vital lever for securing a sustainable future for the developing world, where disease, poverty, and human population growth are most rampant, and resources to address these issues are most limited. The research team investigates how disease control strategies at local-to-global scales benefit human and environmental health. This study builds on the facts that part of every calorie that the more than 1.5 billion worm-infected humans on the planet consume is wasted on feeding or combating these worms, that mass drug administration (MDA) to treat worm infections is cheap and cost-effective, and that fertilizers that wash off an agricultural field fuel waterborne worm infections and reduce water quality. Reducing food wasted on parasitic worms would provide more food for humans and reduce the conversion of natural areas to agriculture, simultaneously mitigating disease, hunger, poverty, climate change, and ecosystem service deficits. Specifically, the research team tests the efficacy of controlling the disease schistosomiasis by removing aquatic vegetation that harbors the snails that are the source of the worms that infect humans. The fieldwork is carried out in Senegal and serves as a prototype for how the management of infectious diseases can promote sustainability across the planet. This project is transformative because it innovatively integrates principles of ecology, disease biology, and socio-economics to develop mitigation strategies and policy recommendations to address global ecological and public health problems. The project provides research opportunities for a postdoctoral researcher and undergraduate and graduate students, including individuals from underserved groups, and it promotes international collaboration with scientists in Senegal.

The first aim of this project is to conduct a global bioeconomic analysis to holistically quantify the substantial economic benefits of MDA to treat human helminths, which, in turn, should more widely promote the use of MDA to reduce not only disease but also undernutrition, poverty, and environmental harm. The second aim of this project is to use randomized control clinical trials to evaluate whether harvesting aquatic vegetation and using it as compost, livestock feed, or fuel for gas-producing biodigesters will decrease human waterborne diseases and poverty, reduce water pollution by recycling nitrogen and phosphorous captured in the plants, and increase profits, open water access, and food and energy production. The third aim of this project is to begin to integrate, translate, and scale these innovations using remote sensing technology to map the abundance of aquatic vegetation and village remoteness. The bioeconomic experimental and mathematical approaches used in this project are general in their construction, offering broad generalizability of the theoretical aspects of this project beyond the specific parasites and locations of empirical work. This allows the project to serve as a blueprint for how to i) disrupt poverty-disease traps, ii) design and test incentives for community-led maintenance of public health benefits, iii) predict the effects of environmental change on the transmission of other parasites, and importantly, iv) synergistically integrate socio-economic and environmental systems to develop innovations that simultaneously improve human health and sustainability. The results from this study will be disseminated through peer-reviewed publications, a public seminar series in the U.S. and Senegal, and workshops at Senegalese research centers.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.

PUBLICATIONS PRODUCED AS A RESULT OF THIS RESEARCH

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(Showing: 1 - 10 of 43)
Aleuy, O Alejandro and Woods, Leslie W and Padilla, Benjamin J and Richardson, Dennis and Schamel, Juliann T and Baker, Stacy and García-Varela, Martín and Hammond, Charlotte and Lawson, Sarah P and Childress, Jasmine N and Rohr, Jason and Lafferty, Kevin "The invasive acanthocephalan parasite Pachysentis canicola is associated with a declining endemic island fox population on San Miguel Island" International Journal for Parasitology , v.54 , 2024 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ijpara.2024.09.003 Citation Details
Brown, Ethan A and Hellenthal, Ronald A and Mahon, Michael B and Rumschlag, Samantha L and Rohr, Jason R "Range maps and waterbody occupancy data for 1158 freshwater macroinvertebrate genera in the contiguous USA" Scientific Data , v.11 , 2024 https://doi.org/10.1038/s41597-024-03845-5 Citation Details
Burton, G Allen and Rohr, Jason R "A Plea for Cumulative Stressor Risk Assessments in Light of Climate Change" Environmental Science & Technology , 2025 https://doi.org/10.1021/acs.est.5c02733 Citation Details
Civitello, David J. and Angelo, Teckla and Nguyen, Karena H. and Hartman, Rachel B. and Starkloff, Naima C. and Mahalila, Moses P. and Charles, Jenitha and Manrique, Andres and Delius, Bryan K. and Bradley, L. M. and Nisbet, Roger M. and Kinunghi, Safari "Transmission potential of human schistosomes can be driven by resource competition among snail intermediate hosts" Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences , v.119 , 2022 https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2116512119 Citation Details
Daversa, D. R. and Hechinger, R. F. and Madin, E. and Fenton, A. and Dell, A. I. and Ritchie, E. G. and Rohr, J. and Rudolf, V. H. and Lafferty, K. D. "Broadening the ecology of fear: non-lethal effects arise from diverse responses to predation and parasitism" Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences , v.288 , 2021 https://doi.org/10.1098/rspb.2020.2966 Citation Details
Doruska, Molly_J and Barrett, Christopher_B and Rohr, Jason_R "Modeling how and why aquatic vegetation removal can free rural households from poverty-disease traps" Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences , v.121 , 2024 https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2411838121 Citation Details
Du, Yuanbao and Xi, Yonghong and Yang, Zhixu and Gu, Dangen and Zhang, Zhixin and Tu, Weishan and Zeng, Yan and Cui, Ruina and Yan, Zhuo and Xin, Yusi and Jin, Wenjia and Zhang, Yan and Yang, Le and Guo, Baocheng and Ke, Zunwei and Rohr, Jason R and Liu, "High risk of biological invasion from prayer animal release in China" Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment , v.22 , 2024 https://doi.org/10.1002/fee.2647 Citation Details
Gu, Shimin and Qi, Tianyi and Rohr, Jason R. and Liu, Xuan "Meta-analysis reveals less sensitivity of non-native animals than natives to extreme weather worldwide" Nature Ecology & Evolution , v.7 , 2023 https://doi.org/10.1038/s41559-023-02235-1 Citation Details
Haggerty, Christopher J.E. and Delius, Bryan K. and Jouanard, Nicolas and Ndao, Pape D. and De Leo, Giulio A. and Lund, Andrea J. and Lopez-Carr, David and Remais, Justin V. and Riveau, Gilles and Sokolow, Susanne H. and Rohr, Jason R. "Pyrethroid insecticides pose greater risk than organophosphate insecticides to biocontrol agents for human schistosomiasis" Environmental Pollution , v.319 , 2023 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.envpol.2022.120952 Citation Details
Haggerty, Christopher J. E. and Halstead, Neal T. and Civitello, David J. and Rohr, Jason R. "Reducing disease and producing food: Effects of 13 agrochemicals on snail biomass and human schistosomes" Journal of Applied Ecology , v.59 , 2021 https://doi.org/10.1111/1365-2664.14087 Citation Details
Han, Guixin and Kong, Ren and Liu, Chunsheng and Huang, Kai and Xu, Qiaolin and Wu, Jian and Fei, Jiamin and Zhang, Hui and Su, Guanyong and Letcher, Robert J and Shi, Jianbo and Rohr, Jason R "Field and Laboratory Evidence That Chlorpyrifos Exposure Reduced the Population Density of a Freshwater Snail by Increasing Juvenile Mortality" Environmental Science & Technology , v.58 , 2024 https://doi.org/10.1021/acs.est.4c04202 Citation Details
(Showing: 1 - 10 of 43)

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