DISES: Integrating Socio-Economic and Environmental Interventions to Improve Well-Being in Vulnerable Communities

Schistosomiasis, the second most socioeconomically burdensome neglected tropical disease globally, is caused by snail-transmitted flatworms that penetrate human skin. It originates in the aquatic ecology of rural communities, defies control efforts, reinforces poverty, and damages children’s health and education advancement because even when provided drugs to clear the infections, humans quickly get re-infected when they return to snail-infested waterbodies. A newly identified solution synergistically leverages feedback in socio-environmental systems through targeted aquatic vegetation harvest at community water access points where most infections occur. The next challenge is how to scale and sustain that solution. If successful, the low-cost, information-based design this project tests can provide a model for community-based solutions to similar poverty-disease traps worldwide. The project advances STEM education for students, creates a multi-institution seminar course and develops a public seminar series to improve the public’s understanding of science and the scientific method. This project implements a randomized controlled trial and field experiments with human subjects, coupled with longitudinal collection of household survey, ecological and human health data. The objective is to evaluate whether education on the public health and/or private economic benefits of vegetation removal can effectively scale and sustain ecologically non-disruptive aquatic vegetation harvest and thereby suppress schistosomiasis infection and boost agricultural productivity and well-being in rural communities. The project also monitors whether these interventions inadvertently induce unintended ecological or social spillover effects and whether the benefits of vegetation removal are distributed towards the relatively poor or better-off households. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.