Key Insights
In addition to effective policymaking, it is important that climate and environmental health risks are strategically communicated to local communities to ensure that the work we do is impactful and does not remain in academic silos. As part of this, public engagement is a key focus of our work as we co-create and collaborate with community partners who possess invaluable local expertise and experience.
Projects
Safe Drinking Water in Bangladesh
Led by A/Prof. Yann Boucher, this project studies how polluted water affects the gut microbiome and health of residents in Mathbaria, Bangladesh.
Microclimate and Mosquitoes
Climate change and human activities are reshaping landscapes worldwide, creating new environments that influence the distribution and behavior of disease vectors.
SENSOR: implications for surveillance and control
Discursive trends in global and environmental health
Related Publications
The use of drones for mosquito surveillance and control
In recent years, global health security has been threatened by the geographical expansion of vector-borne infectious diseases such as malaria, dengue, yellow fever, Zika and chikungunya. For a range of these vector-borne diseases, an increase in residual (exophagic)...
Sustained Local Diversity of Vibrio cholerae O1 Biotypes in a Previously Cholera-Free Country
Although the current cholera pandemic can trace its origin to a specific time and place, many variants of Vibrio cholerae have caused this disease over the last 50 years. The relative clinical importance and geographical distribution of these variants have changed...
Quantifying human-animal contact rates in Malaysian Borneo: Influence of agricultural landscapes on contact with potential zoonotic disease reservoirs
Changing landscapes across the globe, but particularly in Southeast Asia, are pushing humans and animals closer together and may increase the likelihood of zoonotic spillover events. Malaysian Borneo is hypothesized to be at high risk of spillover events due to...
Simultaneous Quantification of Vibrio metoecus and Vibrio cholerae with Its O1 Serogroup and Toxigenic Subpopulations in Environmental Reservoirs
Vibrio metoecus is a recently described aquatic bacterium and opportunistic pathogen, closely related to and often coexisting with Vibrio cholerae. To study the relative abundance and population dynamics of both species in aquatic environments of cholera-endemic and...
Pandemic Vibrio cholerae acquired competitive traits from an environmental Vibrio species
Vibrio cholerae is a human pathogen that thrives in estuarine environments. Within the environment and human host, V. cholerae uses the type VI secretion system (T6SS) to inject toxic effectors into neighboring microbes and to establish its replicative niche. V....
Influence of Landscape Patterns on Exposure to Lassa Fever Virus, Guinea
Lassa fever virus (LASV) is the causative agent of Lassa fever, a disease endemic in West Africa. Exploring the relationships between environmental factors and LASV transmission across ecologically diverse regions can provide crucial information for the design of...
Mapping Malaria Vector Habitats in West Africa: Drone Imagery and Deep Learning Analysis for Targeted Vector Surveillance
Disease control programs are needed to identify the breeding sites of mosquitoes, which transmit malaria and other diseases, in order to target interventions and identify environmental risk factors. The increasing availability of very-high-resolution drone data...
Simian malaria: a narrative review on emergence, epidemiology and threat to global malaria elimination
Simian malaria from wild non-human primate populations is increasingly recognised as a public health threat and is now the main cause of human malaria in Malaysia and some regions of Brazil. In 2022, Malaysia became the first country not to achieve malaria elimination...
Human movement patterns of farmers and forest workers from the Thailand-Myanmar border
Background: Human travel patterns play an important role in infectious disease epidemiology and ecology. Movement into geographic spaces with high transmission can lead to increased risk of acquiring infections. Pathogens can also be distributed across the landscape...
Climate change and population health in Singapore: a systematic review
Gaseous emissions have contributed to global warming, an increase in the frequency of extreme weather events and poorer air quality. The associated health impacts have been well reported in temperate regions. In Singapore, key climate change adaptation measures and...
Applications and advances in acoustic monitoring for infectious disease epidemiology
Emerging infectious diseases continue to pose a significant burden on global public health, and there is a critical need to better understand transmission dynamics arising at the interface of human activity and wildlife habitats. Passive acoustic monitoring (PAM),...
Dynamic Subspecies Population Structure of Vibrio cholerae in Dhaka, Bangladesh
Cholera has been endemic to the Ganges Delta for centuries. Although the causative agent, Vibrio cholerae, is autochthonous to coastal and brackish water, cholera occurs continually in Dhaka, the inland capital city of Bangladesh which is surrounded by fresh water....
The 2010 Cholera Outbreak in Haiti: How Science Solved a Controversy
On January 12, 2010, a catastrophic 7.0 magnitude earthquake struck Haiti, affecting 3,500,000 people [1], [2]. This severely damaged an already marginal public sanitation system, creating ideal conditions for outbreaks of major infectious diseases. In October 2010,...
Emergence, ecology and dispersal of the pandemic generating Vibrio cholerae lineage
Although cholera is an ancient disease that first arose at least half a millennium ago, it remains a major health threat globally. Its pandemic form is caused by strains from a single lineage of the bacterium Vibrio cholerae. The ancestor of this lineage harbored...
Vibrios: a microbial barometer of climate change
Cases of vibriosis, waterborne or foodborne infections from the human pathogens Vibrio species such as Vibrio vulnificus and Vibrio parahaemolyticus, have dramatically risen as a result of warming waters. Their abundance is directly related to water temperature (Fig....
Wastewater surveillance for climate-resilient pathogen monitoring
Traditional disease surveillance systems are ill-equipped to handle climate change–driven shifts in pathogen dynamics. If paired with wastewater surveillance, a cost-effective and scalable approach for generating high-resolution health data, such next-generation...
Climate-driven resurgence of Cholera
Bangladesh experienced its largest number of cholera cases in decades in 2022, surpassing half a million in a single year. It also experienced record heat during that summer, causing droughts in various parts of the country. Access to clean drinking water is a...