7 days ago
UGA study on economic power focuses on links between poverty and pandemics
New research from the University of Georgia and Oklahoma State University says that socioeconomic factors could be a major force behind how disease outbreaks emerge and spread.
In layman's terms, the universities' research said there was a link between poverty and pandemics.
The UGA study found that outbreaks of bacterial diseases like tuberculosis and salmonella were caused by factors including poverty, international travel and poor access to health care.
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Additionally, the study found that while environmental conditions like weather or natural disasters, even how often you come into contact with animals or livestock, can impact diseases' spread, it was "often socioeconomic factors that help these diseases spread widely."
'It's important to think about what conditions we are creating that might lead to disease outbreaks in the future,' Payton Phillips, lead author of the study and a postdoctoral researcher at UGA's Savannah River Ecology Laboratory, said in a statement. 'It's our behavior, our medical systems, our travel, our economic conditions that play a role in disease outbreaks.'
As far as poverty and pandemics developing, researchers from UGA and OSU analyzed data from more than 300 global disease outbreaks.
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In particular, UGA said the universities looked at the 100 largest outbreaks between 1977 and 2017, examining '48 different drivers of disease outbreaks, divided into socioeconomic or environmental categories.'
Among socioeconomic factors, researchers studied how use of antibiotics, contamination of water and food, sewage management and public health infrastructure impacted disease outbreaks.
While animals are a factor 75% of emerging diseases, UGA said, their study showed that it was human behavior that was a risk.
'Many viruses are naturally found in certain animals,' Phillips said. 'But it's our behavior that allows them to spread.'
An example cited by the study was the move of Ebola from bats to people.
Once the disease jumps from animal to human, it spreads rapidly.
The study itself said that 'socioeconomic factors also act as amplifiers of viral outbreaks, with higher case numbers in viral outbreaks driven by a larger proportion of socioeconomic factors. Our results demonstrate that it is useful to consider the drivers of global disease patterns in aggregate due to commonalities that cross disease systems.'
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