$50 million grant extends U's effort on emerging diseases

Five years ago, avian flu raised alarms about diseases that cross from animals to humans. Now, it's Ebola, a disease that's been traced to bats.

The Ebola crisis ravaging West Africa has demonstrated that health care workers confronting such "zoonotic diseases" need specialized training for surveillance, research and outbreak response — and the University of Minnesota is building a reputation for providing it.

With a $50 million grant announced Monday, the U will lead a consortium of universities in extending an international project to prepare medical professionals for such crises.The project began with a growing international consensus that the spread of infectious diseases must be viewed through the relationship among humans, animals and the environment, an approach the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) calls One Health.

Fully three-fourths of recently emerging infectious diseases affecting humans came from animals, the CDC says.

"One of the big lessons learned through avian influenza was that [researchers and educators] really need to partner together around diseases that move from animals to humans," said Katey Pelican, an associate professor of veterinary population medicine at the U who's one of the leaders of the project.

"We need to precede the emergence of these diseases with a workforce that is comfortable working across sectors," Pelican said.

Interdisciplinary teams from the U and Tufts University in Massachusetts have been working with universities in central and east Africa and around Southeast Asia — where data showed a real threat of emerging hot spots — for the past five years. The so-called Respond Project had been funded with a cap of $185 million from the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), which recently expired.

The initial effort resulted in a network in Africa made up of 14 public health and veterinary medicine institutions from the Democratic Republic of Congo, Ethiopia, Kenya, Tanzania, Rwanda and Uganda. And in Southeast Asia it resulted in a network made up of 14 faculty members from 10 universities in Indonesia, Malaysia, Thailand and Vietnam.

Pelican said the goal is to strengthen university curricula and produce graduates who are ready to start work at a high level on infectious diseases like Ebola, and to offer continuing education for workers and government officials.

The U will contribute faculty from its programs in veterinary medicine, public health, medicine, nursing, environmental health, and education and development. Tufts will contribute faculty from veterinary and medical schools.

Primary leads on the project are William Bazeyo of Makerere University in Uganda, Noor Hassim of Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia, Saul Tzipori of Tufts, and David Chapman, of the U's College of Education and Development.

"Historically … Ebola was not in the countries that are currently in crisis," Pelican said. "And we have had Ebola and Marburg [viruses] in Uganda, where we've been working, and there've been multiple outbreaks in the Congo," she said. "You go where the outbreaks are occurring, but obviously, they can occur in many places."