A new paper by a team of Duke authors, including DUPRI Scholar and Professor of Evolutionary Anthropology Charles Nunn, and with support provided by the Duke Center for Population Health and Aging explores "How market integration impacts human disease ecology."
Market integration (MI), or the shift from subsistence to market-based livelihoods, profoundly influences health, yet its impacts on infectious diseases remain underexplored. In this article, the authors synthesize the current understanding of MI and infectious disease to stimulate more research, specifically aiming to leverage concepts and tools from disease ecology and related fields to generate testable hypotheses. Embracing a One Health perspective, the authors examine both human-to-human and zoonotic transmission pathways in their environmental contexts to assess how MI alters infectious disease exposure and susceptibility in beneficial, detrimental and mixed ways. For human-to-human transmission, they consider how markets expand contact networks in ways that facilitate infectious disease transmission while also increasing access to hygiene products and housing materials that likely reduce infections. For zoonotic transmission, MI influences exposures to pathogens through agricultural intensification and other market-driven processes that may increase or decrease human encounters with disease reservoirs or vectors in their shared environments. The authors also consider how MI-driven changes in noncommunicable diseases affect immunocompetence and susceptibility to infectious disease. Throughout, they also identify statistical, survey and laboratory methods from ecology and the social sciences that will advance interdisciplinary research on MI and infectious disease.