Advancing One Health Data Capture at the Point of Zoonotic Spillover in the Congo Basin Forest Perimeter

Project Summary Averting future global pandemics requires surveillance programs that can quickly and accurately identify potential new outbreaks worldwide. Mobile health technologies (mHealth) are a promising strategy for collecting data on infectious diseases in remote, underserved settings at the nexus of human and wildlife interactions and zoonotic disease spillover. As the use of mHealth technologies has grown in urban settings, it has also begun to expand into rural settings but with additional challenges such as reliable availability of data service and geolocation services. Utilizing a One Health approach, this project will develop new geolocation algorithms enabling mHealth technology use in remote communities and develop an integrated mHealth system that allows healthcare providers to monitor outbreaks of disease in both humans and wildlife simultaneously. The goal of this surveillance system is to improve detection of zoonotic spillover and help to answer decades long questions about the ecological scenarios supporting zoonotic disease emergence, enabling forecasting that could help prevent future outbreaks. During the R33 phase of this project we will: (1) refine, expand and evaluate the tiered mHealth surveillance platform for improved longitudinal acute febrile illness case identification; and (2) utilize the system to investigate the epidemiology of zoonotic virus exposures associated with wildlife contact. This project will provide an optimal scenario for rigorously evaluating the benefits of adding an mHealth component to long term zoonotic disease monitoring, benefiting the sustainability of all developed platforms.