Massey University researchers are celebrating receiving over $1 million in funding from the Health Research Council to look harder at shifts and increases in rates of infection for the country’s most common livestock related disease, leptospirosis.
Their work will involve research collaboration between Massey and Otago Universities and Environmental Science and Research (ESR).
“The beauty of the funding is that it not only involves some of the country’s top epidemiologists, genomic experts, environmental scientists and general practitioners it also enables us to engage with social sciences for the first time,” Massey principal investigator Associate Professor Jackie Benschop said.
“We already know a lot about the what when it comes to lepto but this engagement enables us to better understand the why behind infection rates.”
The funding comes as professional concern about the disease grows for Benschop and her colleagues.
Last year marked a major surge in infection rates, with the 150 reported cases 2.5 times greater than the four year average before it.
This year is also on track to confirm that high rate was not a blip with ESR data indicating it will be at least as high again.
Typically, two-thirds of patients are hospitalised with many suffering from the infection long after it has passed.
The high rate is particularly disturbing given the relatively high profile the disease has always had in the rural community and the availability of effective vaccines and knowledge about wearing protective clothing around livestock.
The research funding comes as the disease appears to be shifting in terms of what sort of people are infected, where infections are happening and even what strains are blighting certain parts of the country.
“The pathways for the disease appear to be changing and we are hoping to learn more about why.
“The incidence rate is still within farm workers but we have seen a particular increase in Waikato in the past year and also in women. Typically lepto has been a working man’s disease with less than 5% women getting infected but last year that was much higher at 14%.”
Researchers suspect flooding, which spread the disease in contaminated water, might explain Waikato’s higher infection rates, accounting for almost a third of last year’s infections with an elevation over autumn when cyclones were experienced there.
Researchers are also starting to recognise shifts in strain location because of water pooling, with the strain that is more water tolerant becoming more prevalent in wetter areas.
The longer-term implications of climate change and disease spread are of particular interest to Benschop and directly reflect the concerns raised last year in a Royal Society report on climate change’s health impacts.
Regional variations are also being noticed, with specific strains of the disease becoming more prominent in Northland and Hawke’s Bay.
Beyond the spread and pattern changes Benschop is looking forward to a better understanding of behavioural shifts that might be contributing to disease outbreaks.
When the research starts next year the soft sciences of social research intend to kick in, with researchers intending to talk individually to about a fifth of those infected.
“We want to go much, much deeper than the usual tick-box approach, which is where the likes of my veterinary, biological sciences and statistics training goes.
“We may know people have ways to protect themselves but still get infected. We need to go much deeper to understand why that is.”
Benschop has some experience working with social science techniques that can be applied here.
She and Massey social science colleagues used such a qualitative approach when interviewing Tanzanian butchers about their attitudes to red meat safety.
“The most interesting thing about that research was finding how gendered the businesses were and how you approach males versus females can make a lot of difference. That is the type of nuance that social science techniques can play a part in working out.
“In this case we have a lot of the data here but we have not looked yet.
“We want to look closer at the demographic, health and morbidity data around all aspects of the patients’ lives,” Benschop said.
