HEALTHY FUTURES

"Health, environmental change and adaptive capacity: mapping, examining and anticipating future risks of water-related vector-borne diseases in eastern Africa"

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 Obiettivo del progetto (Objective)

'The HEALTHY FUTURES project is motivated by concern for the health impacts of environmental changes. HEATHLY FUTURES aims to respond to this concern through construction of a disease risk mapping system for three water-related high-impact VBDs (malaria, Rift valley fever and schistosomiasis) in Africa, accounting for environmental/climatic trends and changes in socio-economic conditions to predict future risk. Concentrating on eastern Africa as a study area, HEALTHY FUTURES comprises a comprehensive, inter-disciplinary consortium of health, environment, socio-economic, disease modelling and climate experts in addition to governmental health departments. To achieve its aims, HEALTHY FUTURES will deploy a bottom-up, end-user/stakeholder-focused approach combining field-, laboratory- and library-based research.'

Introduzione (Teaser)

The Healthy Futures project is an international collaborative research initiative that aims to reduce the future burden of three water-related vector-borne diseases (VBDs) in eastern Africa. The project involves an inter-disciplinary team from 16 institutions in 10 different countries: seven of the institutions are based in Africa.

Descrizione progetto (Article)

Changing environmental, including climate, conditions can potentially increase the incidence of epidemics through altering the distribution and other characteristics of infectious diseases. This could place an excessive burden on already stretched health and/or veterinary services, the provision of which may also face disruption by environmental changes, such as increased flooding.

An estimated 25 % of the total global disease burden is due to the environment. Motivated by the knowledge that each year an estimated 2.4 million environmental health-related deaths in Africa are avoidable, and that the effects of environmental change will be felt most acutely by the poorest members of society, Healthy Futures strives to further understand the relationship between climate and health in eastern Africa and provide stakeholders in the region with the tools to better untilise environmental change information in anticipating the risks of future outbreaks of the three target VBDs (malaria, schistosomiasis and Rift Valley fever).

Progress has been made in the first 18 months of the project in achieving the goals of Healthy Futures. This progress has included the selection of field study sites in Kenya, Rwanda and Uganda for the three VBDs. Climate databases and regional climate stimulations are being developed, and the project is examining past environment-disease outbreaks linkages in the study region. Past environment-disease data are being incorporated into an open-access, historic disease outbreak database incorporating Google Earth.

Capacity enhancement activities carried out in the study area to date include a training workshop involving early stage researchers (post-graduate research students and post-doctoral research fellows) with a particular focus on strengthening their generic, transferable research skills and enhancing their research networks. Healthy Futures has also already created funding opportunities for several Africa- and Europe-based students, which will lead to PhDs and an MSc in research. A large database of the address details and areas of expertise of stakeholders in the research has been compiled and is frequently updated. The majority of the stakeholders included reside in eastern Africa. The database is used as a first point of contact with stakeholders, and to send out updates on the project and related information. Much of the information disseminated to stakeholders is also translated to Kiswahili.

Although the immediate geographic focus of Healthy Futures is eastern Africa, the approach adopted in and the findings of the research are expected to have wider appeal. The first research papers are currently being prepared for publication in science journals, with more papers to be released following the end of the project. Healthy Futures researchers are also heavily involved in the forthcoming (Kigali, Rwanda, March 27-29 2013) conference on health, organised by the Health Secretariat of the East African Community.