Food security and emerging infectious disease: risk assessment and risk management

• Published in: Royal Society open science Vol. 9; no. 2; p. 211687
• Main Authors: Trivellone, Valeria, Hoberg, Eric P, Boeger, Walter A, Brooks, Daniel R
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: England The Royal Society 01-02-2022
• Subjects: climate change; DAMA protocol; Evidence Synthesis; habitat interfaces; pathogen spillover; Science, Society and Policy; Stockholm paradigm; trade; Stockholm paradigm; trade; habitat interfaces; pathogen spillover; DAMA protocol; climate change
• ISSN: 2054-5703; 2054-5703
• DOI: 10.1098/rsos.211687

Climate change, emerging infectious diseases (EIDs) and food security create a dangerous nexus. Habitat interfaces, assumed to be efficient buffers, are being disrupted by human activities which in turn accelerate the movement of pathogens. EIDs threaten directly and indirectly availability and access to nutritious food, affecting global security and human health. In the next 70 years, food-secure and food-insecure countries will face EIDs driving increasingly unsustainable costs of production, predicted to exceed national and global gross domestic products. Our modern challenge is to transform this business as usual and embrace an alternative vision of the biosphere formalized in the Stockholm paradigm (SP). First, a pathogen-centric focus shifts our vision of
, determining how pathogens circulate in realized and potential fitness space.
and pathogen exchange are always heightened at habitat interfaces. Second, apply the document-assess-monitor-act (DAMA) protocol developing strategic data for EID risk, to be translated, synthesized and broadcast as actionable information.
is realized through targeted interventions focused around information exchanged among a community of scientists, policy practitioners of food and public health security and local populations. Ultimately, SP and DAMA protect human rights, supporting food security, access to nutritious food, health interventions and environmental integrity.