By KEVIN MERRILL

It's the kind of scientific question tailor-made for interdisciplinary research. How does Q-fever, a highly contagious and still largely untracked disease, move among people, livestock, and wild animals, and what are the long-term effects of its presence on human health and economic systems?

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Answers may be closer to emerging because of M-Cubed, a new University of Michigan program that is awarding nearly 200 grants to jumpstart interdisciplinary work. The two-year, $15 million effort encourages faculty to explore major issues facing the planet, from climate change and poverty to health and energy.

To qualify, three researchers from different disciplines come up with an idea and agree to work together. The teams get $60,000 to test their theory or carry out research. The Q-fever project, one of 16 funded so far involving at least one SNRE faculty member, resulted from a proposal submitted by Joseph Eisenberg at the School of Public Health and Johannes Foufopoulos and Rebecca Hardin at the School of Natural Resources and Environment.  Using their respective expertise in public health, animal ecology, and social science, they want to better understand the impact of rapid social and ecological change on disease ecology in Africa's drylands, specifically the Laikipia District in Kenya. Their research is examining land and animal management issues and their effect on the transmission of Q-fever, a sometimes fatal disease, among wild and domesticated animals, residents, and visitors.

"If you look at the literature on zoonotic pathogen research, you don't have a lot of interdisciplinary work," said Eisenberg, an associate professor in the Department of Epidemiology and the project's leader. "You've got lab people looking at the virus in order to understand its virulence properties. You've got epidemiologists doing risk factors to see if it is drinking the milk, for example, that's causing the outbreak. And you've got ecologists looking at the animals. There isn't a single person that can actually do it all.  You have to have a team of researchers working together.  And it's hard to find funding sources that will fund an anthropologist, an ecologist, and an epidemiologist."

M-Cubed was created to help address that shortcoming. The program is part of the Third Century Initiative, a $50 million, five-year initiative announced in October 2011 by President Mary Sue Coleman to develop new multi-disciplinary teaching and scholarship approaches as U-M prepares to celebrate its bicentennial in 2017.

"The Third Century Initiative is a powerful testament to our belief in the excellence and creativity of the human capital that is the University of Michigan," President Coleman said in announcing the initiative. "This multi-year investment will deliver new leaders and new ideas for an unpredictable, changing world, and will be a critical, relevant contribution to society."

The Q-fever team
It sounds like the start of a bad joke: Did you hear the one about the epidemiologist, ecologist, and anthropologist who walk onto a savanna ...?

Eisenberg, Foufopoulos, and Hardin acknowledge they are an unlikely trio. Each earned doctoral degrees in different disciplines, pursue different research questions, and focus their field and data collection efforts on different continents.

But M-Cubed is giving the three professors a chance to take their professional collegiality to another level.

Hardin, the anthropologist, and Foufopoulos, the ecologist, have been SNRE colleagues since 2003. In the summer of 2010, they co-taught an undergraduate course funded by the Graham Sustainability Institute. The location was the Mpala Reserve, a privately owned research property in Laikipia, one of 71 districts in Kenya. That experience, and the relationships forged with college professors, health practitioners, and municipal leaders living and working there, laid the groundwork for the Q-fever proposal. Also aiding the effort was financial support from the Graham Sustainability Institute.

"When we returned to the Dana Building, we had several meetings to think about what kinds of research proposals would create institutional partnerships between SNRE and universities in Africa and undo some of the academic silos,"Hardin said. "People were learning about wildlife and human interactions, or about human health, or cattle management. But this intersecting set of issues—that was really on people's minds. And bringing those things together wasn't being done very effectively there or here," Hardin added.

SNRE provided a natural setting for the collaborative effort. "SNRE increasingly is a home for this kind of collaboration, even with other units internally (at U-M), but also with colleagues internationally,"said Hardin.

Kenya is an ideal laboratory to study the issue of disease transmission because of the interactions among species, both wild and domestic. "Here, dairy cattle pretty much hang out with other dairy cattle.  There, it's a whole different thing," Hardin said. "So being able to start building an understanding of how the interspecies mix might matter to transmission and to responses to the disease, that's a nice contribution in terms of thinking about diversity and resilience on a broader scale."

As important as the cross-species interaction is, the presence of humans and their daily interactions with the natural environment is also a key study component, Foufopoulos said.

"If you go to Africa, it's very easy just to get locked into focusing on wildlife because it's so present and impressive. But the truth is, humans are super important. As a matter of fact, wildlife is retreating almost everywhere, even within national parks," he said. "And so you really have to consider humans."

"People realize that if you want to preserve intact ecosystems, you need to look outside just strictly protected areas and see whether you can find solutions that avoid the conflict between nature and humans and find ways to achieve a sustainable presence of humans in this landscape," Foufopoulos added.

"So Mpala, the place where we taught the course, is particularly good in that regard because it's actually private property. It's a ranch, but they are also committed in trying to protect wildlife. So it's a great setting to start addressing these kinds of questions.  The idea was not just to do ecology, looking at wildlife, but to also look at humans," Foufopoulos said. "What are humans doing in the landscape, how can you ensure they have a living? Are there ways of promoting both? It turns out that pathogen transmission between wildlife, livestock, and humans is one of the flash points of this interaction, so understanding and managing pathogen infection is an excellent way to reduce these tensions."

On the ground in Laikipia
The project builds on social and ecological background research from six SNRE master's thesis projects carried out in the past two years in Kenya; this summer's master's thesis research will be conducted by Public Health student Annie Wang, who will work in conjunction with a post-doctoral fellow currently being hired with M-Cubed funds to coordinate summer research in Kenya. Once the initial data are collected, the team will analyze the results, looking for patterns and systems that could provide a framework for understanding the Q-fever transmission and how it is impacting social and economic functions in the community. Ideally, the post-doctoral researcher not only will help with data collection and analysis, but in putting together ideas on how to model the disease, they said. As they do, they will share the results with health officials in Laikipia.

"For a region like this, which is heavily touristic—and the tourism economy in Kenya is extremely important to the national economy—fear of something like Q-fever can keep tourists away because it is so easily transmitted, not only through drinking, but through breathing dust," Hardin said. "So we want to keep it from hobbling food economies, tourist economies, the local health of pastoralists and professionals working in these landscapes."

For Eisenberg, the issue of disease ecology raised in the proposal fits his research interest, which focuses on understanding disease through a systems perspective. Q-fever, he said, is a good model for thinking about zoonotic pathogen transmission and zoonotic disease risk. The appreciation of the importance of this particular disease has been increasing as the number of cases grows, and questions are now being asked about its effect on health systems and local economies.

"You need data to know what's going on, especially when we're looking at a pathogen like Q-fever where there's not a lot of information about it in the literature," Eisenberg said. "So getting that preliminary data in humans, getting preliminary data in livestock and, to what extent we can, in wildlife, is pretty critical. But the other big piece is setting up the framework for how you think about a problem like this, where you're dealing with humans, wildlife and livestock."

As they implement the proposal, the researchers acknowledge that the work is taking place amid major societal change sweeping Kenya. "That's one reason why we all feel committed to being engaged. There is a real strong need for constructive collaborative partnerships in a country that's rewritten its constitution," Hardin said. "They are really triumphing over some violent, divisive forces and trying to emerge as a modern democracy that manages its resources well.  And we would like to be helpful in that struggle."

The Q-Fever Team

Joseph Eisenberg
Position: Associate Professor, Department of Epidemiology, School of Public Health
Research focus: Infectious disease epidemiology with a focus on waterborne and vector-borne diseases. Research interests integrate theoretical work in developing disease transmission models and empirical work in designing and conducting epidemiology studies
Doctoral degree: Ph.D. in Bioengineering, University of California, Berkeley (1992)

Johannes Foufopoulos
Position: Associate Professor, Conservation Ecology field of study, School of Natural Resources and Environment
Research: Disease ecology, host-parasite interactions, ecological immunology, emerging wildlife diseases, conservation biology, habitat fragmentation and extinction, impacts of global climate change on biotic communities, vertebrate ecology
Doctoral degree: Ph.D. in Zoology, University of Wisconsin-Madison (1999)

Rebecca Hardin
Position: Associate Professor, Environmental Justice field of study, School of Natural Resources and Environment
Research: Human and wildlife interactions, and social and environmental change related to tourism, logging, conservation, and hunting in Central Africa forests. Historical and ethnographic aspects of concessionary politics involving corporations, NGOs, and local communities, particularly in Africa
Doctoral degree: Ph.D. in Anthropology, Yale University (2000)