INTERVENTIONS

Human behaviors are complex and dynamic, yet critical to understanding the context for  zoonotic diseases emergence. PREDICT’s One Health surveillance design was inclusive of the behavioral and social sciences, which allowed our teams to more fully identify and characterize the socio-cultural dimensions of virus spillover and spread and to develop potential policy and intervention recommendations for risk reduction, disease prevention, and control.  Our behavioral and social scientists worked together in the field with veterinarians, ecologists, and medical professionals, building trust with local communities and conducting interviews and investigations into risks at each unique human-animal interface.

Our mixed methods strategy utilized ethnographic methods and a structured quantitative questionnaire. We enrolled individuals in hospitals, health centers, and clinics, and conducted interviews and focus groups in communities where wildlife and people were being sampled for virus testing. Although enrolled populations varied across countries and often within countries, they were represented by individuals working in occupations identified as at-risk for zoonotic disease transmission (those in the wildlife trade such as hunters, transporters, vendors, and consumers, butchers and abattoir workers, bat guano harvesters, etc.).

From 2014-2019, our teams completed >20,000 questionnaires, conducted over >1,100 ethnographic interviews, and facilitated >100 focus group discussions engaging nearly 1,000 people.  Insights from these efforts are enabling the identification of control points, behavior change communication recommendations, and potential prevention and risk reduction strategies that could potentially be successfully taken to scale.

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