November 21, 2000
Efforts to understand relationships between human-induced
environmental changes and the emergence of infectious diseases are the basis
for a dozen initial awards announced to fund research projects under the new
Ecology of Infectious Diseases initiative, supported by the National Institutes
of Health (NIH) and the National Science Foundation (NSF).
The highly interdisciplinary research projects will study how large-scale environmental events--such as habitat destruction, biological invasion, and pollution--affect the emergence of viral, parasitic, and bacterial diseases in humans and other animals.
The initiative is a group effort to bridge scientific disciplines in order to meet a critical need. The grants are funded jointly by NSF and three NIH institutes and centers--the Fogarty International Center (FIC), the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), and the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences (NIEHS).
These four organizations have jointly committed more than $23 million to fund the projects over the next five years. Other federal agencies participating in the program are NASA, the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA), and the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS).
“FIC initiated this collaborative effort to address an important gap in the ability of the scientific and public health communities to predict the emergence and transmission of infectious diseases in relation to our rapidly changing global environment,” said FIC Director Gerald Keusch on behalf of the NIH partners.
“This Initiative will allow institutions throughout the world to participate in studies that can lead to the development of predictive models for disease emergence, allowing implementation of strategies to prevent and control disease before an outbreak occurs,” Keusch added.
“The current spread of the West Nile Virus, for example, brings home to all of us the critical need to understand the ecological dynamics of diseases and pathogens,” observed NSF Director Rita Colwell. “This kind of knowledge is at the heart of understanding our planet’s biocomplexity...The studies funded by this competition demonstrate how basic science can have important societal impacts.”