US-UK Collaboration: Integrating ecology, epidemiology, and human interests to guide strategic management of zoonoses in complex wildlife reservoirs

Wild animals host a wide variety of pathogens that can spread to other animals and humans. Such
diseases, including Ebola and COVID-19, significantly affect human health, agriculture and wildlife
conservation. Historically, disease control methods (e.g. vaccination, therapeutics) have focused on
humans or livestock rather than wild animal reservoirs. Focusing on disease control in wildlife could
be more effective in preventing disease emergence in humans, but that approach is currently limited
by three factors. First, many diseases are maintained in cycles that spread across landscapes, but
wildlife diseases are notoriously difficult to assess at these large spatial scales, making responses to
interventions unpredictable. Second, tools like vaccines have been difficult to administer to sufficient
numbers of animals to actually reduce disease transmission in the wild. Third, interventions are
usually bounded by societal constraints, both financial (e.g., limited funds to invest) and sociological
(e.g., conflicting stakeholder interests). New technologies, including vaccines that can spread among
wildlife and miniaturized animal-borne tracking systems, have unrealized potential to overcome these
limitations. This project will focus on reducing vampire bat transmitted rabies, which has significant
human health and agricultural impacts across Latin America, but the methods developed for this study
could be applied to other important wildlife diseases. The project will strengthen research
capacity through training of students and early career scientists in field, laboratory and quantitative methodologies.

This project will conduct field and laboratory research to test specific hypotheses about the
epidemiology and management of vampire bat-transmitted rabies. The researchers will: (1) Use field
experiments with animal-borne GPS tags and large-scale data on bat presence from questionnaires
and historical rabies outbreaks to generate models that can be used to determine how human
disturbance influences bat abundance and dispersal; (2) Conduct studies using captive and wild
vampire bats to determine host and ecological factors that will influence the use of self-spreading
rabies vaccines that target bats; and (3) Use parameters estimated from fieldwork and captive studies
to optimize strategies for localized control and regional elimination of vampire bat rabies that preserve
diverse stakeholder requirements, e.g. wildlife conservation goals as well as improved human and
livestock health.

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.