Syed Abbas of the Public Health Foundation of India in India, with colleagues Manish Kakkar and Krishna Rao, will adapt a Multi-Criteria Decision Analysis approach to integrate different perspectives from the animal, environment, and human health sectors on the impact and intervention scenarios of zoonotic diseases, which infect animals and humans. The impact of a single disease and the effects of a specific intervention strategy affect the sectors in different ways. They will test their approach by consulting major stakeholders in each sector on the impact of intervention on one human disease (rabies) and one animal disease (brucellosis) within their sector, and use these to develop weights that allow direct comparisons across the sectors in order to promote more effective collaborations that can better protect health and food security.

Kim Thomson of the University of Reading in the United Kingdom will develop a combined metric to account for the impact of both human and animal diseases on poverty. This one health metric will incorporate two recognized poverty metrics: one that measures the poverty impact of individual livestock diseases, and the other that measures the poverty impact of human disease, which reflects both quantity and quality of life years. This will enable comparisons of poverty impact both between different diseases and across different populations. Thomson will devise the metric using available global health and disease datasets, and assess its reliability by field-testing it using data from Kenyan households.

Jean-Pierre Scheerlinck of the University of Melbourne in Australia will develop an effective vaccine against the parasite Theileria parva, which causes East Coast Fever in cattle, by conjugating parasite lysates to nanobeads, which act as an adjuvant to induce a strong immune response. Upon infection, the parasite enters cells of the immune system making classical vaccination strategies that induce antibody responses ineffective. Protecting these animals against infection instead requires a cytotoxic T cell immune response. Nanobeads are inexpensive, inert, 40nm diameter beads that, when covered with antigens, can induce a cytotoxic T cell response in humans. Scheerlinck will generate parasite lysates from infected lymphocytes grown in the laboratory as a source of antigens, conjugate it covalently to nanobeads, and inject them into cattle to test for a robust cytotoxic T cell response and protection against Theileria parva infection.

Ndadilnasiya Endie Waziri of the the African Field Epidemiology Network in Nigeria will determine whether combining child and animal vaccination programs can reduce the incidence of vaccine preventable diseases in Nigeria. Current programs often fail to reach highly mobile rural communities who raise livestock. This dependency on livestock may make them more agreeable to vaccination programs that offer protection for both their animals and themselves, which would also optimize the use of limited health care resources. They will use GPS-enabled smart phones to map these nomadic communities and their movements. A vaccination strategy will be designed, and key workers in the human and animal health sector will be trained to educate the communities and deliver vaccinations against a variety of diseases including polio for humans and anthrax for livestock. Coverage and cost-effectiveness of the strategy will be evaluated.