OSU integrative biology team explores link between war and disease outbreaks

Tuesday, October 17, 2023

Media Contact: Elizabeth Gosney | CAS Marketing and Communications Manager | 405-744-7497 | egosney@okstate.edu

Four current and former Oklahoma State University researchers recently published findings that show a critical connection between armed conflicts and disease outbreaks. 

Former OSU postdoctoral scholar Dr. Mekala Sundaram, postdoctoral fellow Dr. Antoine Filion, graduate student Benedicta Akaribo Essuon and Department of Integrative Biology assistant professor Dr. Patrick Stephens published “Footprint of war: integrating armed conflicts in disease ecology,” which delves into how armed conflicts — including riots, wars or terrorist attacks — extend beyond immediate suffering by influencing the dynamics of diseases. 

In areas where armed conflicts are ongoing, the ability of health care workers to respond swiftly to disease outbreaks is severely hindered, Stephens explained. Access to these regions becomes challenging, making it difficult to detect and contain diseases in their early stages. Over long-term periods, frequent or prolonged conflicts can disrupt the medical infrastructure and displace local health care workers. This makes it challenging for external agencies to gauge the extent of the crisis.

“Even well-organized global organizations like the World Health Organization can’t respond to a disease outbreak that they are unaware of,” Stephens said. “The longer an outbreak remains unchecked, the more severe it becomes, leading to a higher number of cases.” 

In a preliminary analysis presented in the research team’s commentary, the authors compared the number of disease outbreaks in four sub-Saharan countries over a 40-year period. They discovered that the two countries experiencing more frequent armed conflicts — defined as events with at least 25 casualties — had more than twice as many disease outbreaks compared to others in the same region.

The overall goal of the research is to emphasize how armed conflicts might influence disease outcomes and advocate for global data sources that can facilitate quantitative analysis of when, where and to what extent armed conflicts have shaped disease dynamics.

The study was co-led by Sundaram and Filion. Filion, who is a postdoctoral scholar in Stephens’ lab, came up with the original concept for the study and led initial writing of the manuscript. He mentions: “with the increase in the number of zoonotic diseases emerging from all over the world, gaining a deep understanding of their dynamic, but also of human drivers preventing health care workers to report such outbreaks, should be of prime importance.”

Sundaram, who recently joined the University of Georgia faculty, conceived of the data summaries presented.

“In particular, I conceived the idea of graphing cumulative disease burden across different countries,” Sundaram said. “As the results show, war-torn countries have double the cumulative disease burden as compared to peaceful countries. The role of war in exacerbating infectious disease outbreaks is not well understood because it is often ignored. But in this paper we offer a way of incorporating war into studies of disease.”

Essuon was instrumental in data collection for the study, and her efforts have advanced the research significantly according to Stephens. Currently, Essuon is conducting a rigorous analysis using statistical models to examine how armed conflicts may have influenced Ebola virus outbreaks. Her work seeks to establish statistically significant relationships between the severity and frequency of armed conflicts and the characteristics of Ebola virus outbreaks. Early findings suggest that regions with more frequent conflicts witness Ebola outbreaks that start closer to conflict sites and last longer, indicating delayed responses and heightened challenges in containment.

Stephens hopes that their research will serve as a catalyst for inspiring further quantitative research into the intricate connections between armed conflicts and disease outcomes. He said understanding this relationship is vital because poverty, armed conflicts and disease outbreaks can form harmful feedback loops that ultimately damage local economies and exacerbate poverty.

This research is part of an NIH-funded project, “Spillover of Ebola and other Filoviruses at Ecological Boundaries," which has received funding totaling $2.4 million, and is set to continue for nearly three more years. The grant is in collaboration with several researchers at the University of Georgia, in Athens.

Check out the team's research through ScienceDirect and from Cell Press: Trends in Parasitology. 

Story By: Allie Putman | CAS Graduate Assistant | allie.putman@okstate.edu