TICKRISK - Co-developing preparedness and risk communication: Crimean-Congo Hemorrhagic Fever knowledge, politics, experience in European borderlands

This project discusses the role of CCHFv in Spain as it becomes endemic in this European borderland. Spain is an indispensable case study for our project, reflected both in CCHFv's emerging endemicity, its role as an essential stopover point for migratory birds carrying infected ticks, and increased attention on the virus by medical research groups, entomologists, ecologists, and conservation researchers. This project will bring ongoing medical, ecological and entomological disciplines reporting on CCHFv in Spain into conversation with medical anthropological concepts to support Europe-wide risk communication and epidemic preparedness.The remit of this project is to "follow the tick" and its interactions with humans and nonhumans to better understand the different at-risk human groups and the quantification and qualification of human-tick encounters in rural spaces where the frequency of CCHFv infection and the abundance of vectors is known. Supervised by Dr Almudena Mari Saez (PI) and led by Dr Ritti Soncco (postdoctoral fellow), this project will be located at the Institut de Recherche pour le Développement Délégation Régionale Occitanie (IRD) in Montpellier. Fieldwork will be multi-sited spread over 6 visits to sites of interest with a minimum stay of 45 days each time. Field sites of specific interest are the Doñana National Park (Andalucia) and Delta del Ebro (Catalonia) for their role in bird migration, tourist attraction, and as points of agricultural interest. Research collaborations will include the Grupo de Investigación en Sanidad y Biotecnología (SaBio), the Institute for Game and Wildlife Research (IREC), the Spanish Scientific Research Council (CSIC), as well as members of the established at-risk demographic, i.e, hunters, farmers, slaughterhouse workers, veterinarians, their families, and people who engage in other at-risk activities such as hiking, walking, nature tourism, etc. This project will "follow the tick" to establish the factors impacting CCHFv surveillance in Spain. Ethnographic fieldwork will take place over three methods: The first method will center how people reproduce the tick in social contexts, i.e., the oral narratives, urban legends, materialities, and embodied knowledge shared by humans about ticks and tick encounters. The stories we tell about nonhuman vectors reveal the social knowledge in circulation, the knowledge enabling or hindering risk preparedness, and how to best target the different at-risk demographics in order to increase public knowledge on tick-borne illnesses. Participant observation and interviews will be conducted with hunters, farmers, their families, slaughterhouse workers, veterinarians, and people who move through rural spaces frequently, e.g., Spanish nationals, Spanish residents, and international tourists either visiting from areas where ticks and tick-borne diseases are endemic or who frequently return to Spanish spaces of endemicity. The second method will explore how the politics of national identity, beauty, wilderness, and history are reproduced in national parks and how these politics engage the (im)possibility of diseases and danger in a tension of visibility and invisibility. Data collection will include digital methods of online representations of landscapes, and participant observation and interviews with residents, tour guides, tourists, hikers, and walkers moving through the landscapes. The final method will engage entomologists, ornithologists, and epidemiologists researching the relationship between migratory birds, traveling ticks, and the impact of climate change on avian migratory routes in our selected field sites. This part of the project will link how "following the tick" serves medical knowledge production and epidemic preparedness beyond the Spanish borderlands. Communication will be maintained at all times with Dr Almudena Mari Saez, our team Principle Investigators, and my fellow postdoctoral candidates for comparative data analysis to create an archive of CCFHv risk communication and epidemic preparedness for Europe.