An Ecological Approach to Emerging Diseases

Penn State’s Forensics alumna Sam Muller interviews anthropologist Sagan Friant about her research on human-environment interactions and their impacts on human health, particularly in Nigeria. Much of Friant's work centers on the emergence of new zoonotic diseases, which originate in animals and can be transmitted to humans. 

Sam Muller
Penn State Forensics alumna, Class of 2022

Sagan Friant
Assistant Professor of Anthropology, Penn State

Transcript

Mark Shriver:

From the Center for Human Evolution and Diversity at Penn State, this is Tracking Traits. 

[THEME MUSIC]

Cole Hons: 

Greetings fellow Homo sapiens, this is Cole Hons from The Huck Institutes of the Life Sciences. Welcome back to the podcast. 

For episode six of our third season, Sam Muller, a recent graduate of Penn State’s Forensics program, interviews Sagan Friant, assistant professor of anthropology at Penn State. Friant’s research focuses on human-environment interactions and their impacts on human health, particularly in Nigeria. Much of her work centers on the emergence of new zoonotic diseases, which originate in animals and can be transmitted to humans. 

In her podcast discussion with Sam, Friant covers a wide range of topics related to her research, including Nigeria’s hunting and wildlife trade, Mpox (formerly known as monkeypox), and Lassa fever. Additionally, she emphasizes the importance of the One Health concept, which recognizes the profound interconnectedness of human, animal, and environmental health. As Friant shares in this conversation with examples from her own work, this more comprehensive approach can lead to insights that would be impossible otherwise.

Finally, she discusses her passion for community-based solutions and the importance of collaboration in her research. Here's Sam Muller interviewing Sagan Friant about “an ecological approach to emerging diseases.”

[MUSIC]

Sam Muller:

Thank you so much for coming today to chat with me. I'm really excited to get to know you. I'm looking forward to this podcast. Why don't we start by having you introduce yourself to the audience to tell us a little bit about your background and about your research?

Sagan Friant:

Thanks. It's really nice to be here. My name's Sagan Friant. I am an assistant professor of the Department of Anthropology and a Huck co-hire, and my research takes place in Nigeria, where I study human environment interactions and how they impact human health, with a focus on the social and ecological origins of new diseases.

Sam Muller: 

Awesome. So these new diseases that you're studying, they're zoonotic diseases, is that correct?

Sagan Friant:

Yeah, so a majority of emerging infectious diseases, so these are any diseases that are increasing in geographic spread or incidents in human populations, are zoonotic, meaning they come from animals. And within that, a majority of those diseases are from wildlife. We've had a long history, a long relationship with domesticated animals, so a lot of things that we see that are new tend to be coming from wildlife, that we have been less likely to contact in the past, or at a lower frequency.

Sam Muller:

Gotcha. So, what diseases specifically are you looking at?

Sagan Friant:

So I have three projects and one I call a pathogen-agnostic project. So this doesn't look at any specific disease, it looks at a pathway by which people frequently get infected with diseases from wildlife, and that's through hunting and wildlife trade. And so we study some of the health benefits and health consequences of human/animal interactions through hunting and wildlife trade. And then two other projects, one focused on Mpox, which the audience may know more broadly as monkeypox, but that's been recently renamed, as well as Lassa fever and those are two diseases that are endemic to Africa and are emerging in the area that I work in Nigeria.

Sam Muller:

Awesome. We'll definitely talk about those a little bit more, but one thing I did want to talk about off the bat was, the One Health concept and you talk about this on your website and I've seen a lot of interesting mentions of it. Can you explain further what that concept is and what it means to your research?

Sagan Friant:

Yeah, so to me it's a very simple and obvious concept, but I think it's not so obvious when you think about human medicine more broadly. So One Health is just the interrelated health of humans, animals, and the environment. And this is typically envisioned through a Venn diagram in which you have humans, animals, and the environment and how the health of each of these is impacted by each other. And so this means, that we can't have healthy humans in the absence of healthy animals and healthy environments. And I think it suggests a broader approach to thinking about human health as opposed to treating symptoms or biomedical solutions and makes us think about the ways that we're interacting ecologically over large time scales with animals and the environment and provides a more holistic view of what it means to be healthy.

Sam Muller:

That's awesome. I think also, you talk a lot about community-based solutions in your research, which I think is really important to discuss because we're looking for not only wins for local scientists, but also wins for the community. How have you worked to find those types of solutions and give back to the communities where you do your research?

Sagan Friant:

Yeah. So I'm a big fan of the idea of win-wins, and so I kind of use the One Health concept as a way to identify solutions that provide win-wins for humans, animals and the environment. So a solution that may improve human health but be really detrimental to the environment may not be a great solution. So one example, is by stopping hunting. That may block zoonotic disease transmission, but that's not necessarily going to help human health holistically because a lot of these animals are really important for human nutrition. And also, using that to find win-wins not only for science and for health, but also the communities that we work in. And so finding solutions that really articulate with the social and economic needs of the community and are often derived from the community themselves.

Sam Muller:

Amazing. I love that concept and I love that approach to research. That's great. What is one aspect of your research that maybe you don't get to talk about as much, but something that you're quite proud of? 

Sagan Friant:

So, I've been working in Nigeria for 15 years, conducting long-term research and what people see from that are the publications and the grants that come out of that and you know, what I tell them when I come back. But the amount of infrastructure, both in personnel and in equipment that I've had to develop there to conduct successful science, is something that I'm really proud of. So I've been working with a team of Nigerian research assistants for seven years, so since my postdoc and I'm just really proud of our team and the way we work together and we have fun together and they've worked with me on multiple projects. But also, to do this research, there's not constant power in Nigeria, transportation is really challenging.

I currently have two trucks and two houses in Nigeria, which is extremely challenging to navigate the process of...one of the houses we built in the middle of a national park that has no road, just getting that field station constructed. And now we have researchers coming in and out of that. We have solar panels, so we're able to do some more lab-based research and maintain a cold chain. Hugely logistically challenging. At one point, the rains came really early and our cement blocks that we were using to build the house were washed into the river…

Sam Muller:

Wow.

Sagan Friant:

... and someone had to go and collect them using a hand-built canoe and swimming and getting the cement blocks out of the river. So that's just one small challenge, but the ability, I say for me, but also my team more broadly, to make that happen is an enormous effort and something that I think that we're all really proud of.

Sam Muller:

That sounds incredible. Can you give us a little bit of an insight as to what you're actually doing there, how you're interacting with the communities and maybe what you're sampling?

Sagan Friant:

Yeah, so I'll take my long-term project, the Cross River Ecology and Health Project as an example. I have a couple other projects, but they're just getting going and I'd be happy to talk about those, as well. But the Cross River Ecology and Health Project is based in Cross River National Park and within the national park there's many communities that are on the support zone of the national park, and also enclave communities that are in the middle of the national park that were meant to be relocated, but for one reason or another, weren't. 

And so my project takes place in these communities, looking at how the environment changes across this landscape due to human pressures largely and how that affects human interactions with animals. And so this has involved collecting data, working with hunters, doing a lot of surveys and questionnaires, observations, following hunters into the forest for days or weeks at a time, observing their hunting and butchering behavior, to understand the nature and frequency of human animal interactions that could lead to zoonotic disease transmission.

And as part of that research, we looked at what makes an individual in this community hunt versus not hunt? So if I work in a community, what are the drivers of hunting? And so we did a bit of a case control study where we had hunters and non-hunters. One of the major things that came up in that study was people's reason for hunting, consistently said that it was a low-merit livelihood, something that was considered undesirable. This is a question that in qualitative research, we say reaches saturation very quickly. Everyone gives you very similar answers and you don't have to continue to ask it to everyone. So, it continually came up and the number one reason that people said that they were hunting was to feed their children. And so this could mean feed your children directly, as in the food from the animals goes to the children or selling that meat for school fees or other food resources.

And so trying to get at that question, we did a follow up study that was based on the nutritional importance of wild meat in diets of people living in these rainforest communities, which is something that people have a lot of conflicting opinions about and probably because that relationship changes, depending on who you are and where you are in the landscape. And so we collected data on 24 hour recalls of what people were eating. We collected samples of meat to do nutritional analyses on, and we actually did these 24 hour food intake observations, where we recorded the recipes and even went as far as counting the bites that people took of different foods. So that was very much a nutritional ecology approach. So in general, my research combines observation and questionnaires in the field, with some sort of laboratory analyses using methods from nutritional or disease ecology.

Sam Muller:

Another question would be, why Nigeria specifically? So why did you choose to go to these communities and do your research focusing on them?

Sagan Friant:

I was young and naïve (laughs), and so I actually knew very little about Nigeria, which was probably for the best because people have a lot of opinions about Nigeria. And by going in there a little bit naive and blindly and open to the opportunity, I became invested and started to really enjoy working in Nigeria. For all of the bad rap that Nigeria gets, it's a really fun and exciting and super important place to work. So, I didn't go there for a specific reason that was specific to Nigeria. There was a project looking for somebody to study primate disease ecology and so I went on that, and I just got really invested with the people in the communities and the biodiversity in that area. And so that was for my master's project, and I ended up going back to do my PhD research there, my postdoc research. And now my research as faculty at Penn State is all based in Nigeria.

Sam Muller:

I was curious, when you were talking about the bush meat consumption and trade within these rural areas of Nigeria, what is the culture surrounding bush meat itself? Is it just used as food or does it have other cultural significance, as well?

Sagan Friant:

Yeah, that's a really great question. One thing about bush meat in Nigeria is that it is enjoyed by everyone. So even if you were to combat the nutritional need for it, it's a cultural delicacy that people like across rural and urban areas. It's also, wild animals are used for cultural and medicinal purposes. So much like you would think about people use plants for medicine, they also use wild animals in many, many different ways in a practice called zoo therapy. And so this involves different species, preparations and prescriptions that we begin to document over the years, that might provide additional pathways for zoonotic disease transmission. And then importantly, these wild animals are really widely traded, so they're traded between households in the community, they're traded between communities in the area, and they're also traded to regional markets, national markets, and sometimes internationally. And so, one of the things that I say or that I just said, was that Nigeria's a really important place to work.

So, it has really unique biodiversity that we know proportionally, less about than other areas of Africa. It's sandwiched between coastal West Africa and Central Africa and has a lot of endemic species, including a unique subspecies of chimpanzee and gorilla. And what that means for the diseases that are circulating in these populations is largely unknown. But also, Nigeria has a vastly growing population. So there's over 200 million people. It's projected to outgrow the US by 2050 and people move around a lot. Through wildlife trade and other means, animals that were once secluded in a forest somewhere, can now move between major trading hubs in Nigeria in a matter of days, taking their pathogens along with them. And that's one of the things that we're looking at, is how handling practices and exposure risks varies according to where you are in the supply chain. So we're interviewing people about their handling practices and we're also testing these animals for different, potentially zoonotic pathogens.

Sam Muller:

So in regards to, you said that you have a more continual project that you've been working on for a while, which is the bush meat project, and then you have a couple that are just starting up now regarding Mpox and Lassa virus. Can you talk a little bit, let's focus in on Mpox first, about what is that, how serious it is and maybe what you're doing, what you're specifically looking at for that disease?

Sagan Friant:

Yeah, I'm really excited about this project. My team is in the field conducting their first interview as we speak, probably. So I'll probably start getting some data back by the end of the day, hopefully. But this is a project that was conceived a couple years ago prior to the global Mpox outbreak, before the world knew what Mpox was and it was delayed because of COVID and some other reasons, and now we're just restarting it. But we know very little about Mpox in Nigeria. So there's a longer history of research in Central Africa, which is a different clade of Mpox. And in 2017, there was an outbreak in Nigeria, and there’s been subsequently, every year there's a number of cases and we know very little about the zoonotic risk factors or the natural history of the virus in Nigeria.

And the Nigeria CDC and US CDC wanted to conduct some ecological studies to look into the reservoir, some epidemiological case control studies to look at risk factors. But it's really hard to know where to start in that line of inquiry when you know so little about the history of the disease and so they've contracted me to do some ethnographic work. So we're following up with people who have had recent Mpox cases or who have had Mpox recently, and we're talking to them about the behaviors that might have exposed them to Mpox within the three weeks prior to symptoms. And this can give us a better idea of the types of animals that people are coming in contact with, including humans.

So there's human-to-human transmission more than we expected, as well as the different behaviors. And really, when you think about an epidemiological survey, you may think, "Okay, have you consumed a bush meat? Yes or no? Have you touched an animal? Yes or no?" And what these methods do, are they use observation, but also open lines of inquiry to allow us to think about the human animal interface more broadly. So rodent infestation of households, finding animals dead, using them for medicinal purposes, trade, consumption, preparation practices. So they go more in depth than a yes/no question, what species and what type of contact, and can give us a better understanding of the nature and frequency of human interactions in endemic areas for Mpox, that can hopefully generate some hypotheses for future case control and epidemiological investigations.

Sam Muller:

Gotcha. And is that similar or different than what you're doing with the Lassa virus?

Sagan Friant:

So Lassa virus is quite different. So we know more about Lassa virus in Nigeria and from other areas of West Africa, where it's endemic. And one of the things, importantly, that we know is the primary natural reservoir, which is the multimammate mouse or rat, depending on who you ask. And so this animal, Mastomys natalensis, reproduces abundantly and really dominates human-driven landscapes. And so when we know the primary reservoir, we can ask more interesting questions about how humans interact with the landscape and animals, not only that drives exposure. So a lot of studies tend to focus on human animal contact via tallies of “how often you've contacted this animal, in what way?”

But I think humans are impacting the system in a wider set of behaviors. And so this includes agricultural practices that might influence the population abundance and dynamics of the reservoir, which in turn, has consequences for the dynamics of the disease, including the prevalence in the reservoir population, the seasonality of that disease within the reservoir, I think is all impacted by human activities. These are really, we call philanthropic rodents. So they live in human settlements, in human agricultural fields. They subsist off of human crops, they live in human houses.

I think a lot of their behavior and their ecology is synced to human behaviors. And we can start to get at that broader level of human animal environment interactions, bringing it back to that One Health triad, when we can focus on a specific reservoir and a specific system. So that study involves ecological surveys of Mastomys natalensis, combined with in-depth investigation of human behaviors, both using questionnaires and observational methods and tracking human activities in time and space, to understand how that human reservoir interface is constructed.

Sam Muller:

I know that you have done this a long time, so I'm sure that you have established methods. But I can see there being a big difference between conducting these surveys and these studies in more rural societies compared to how it might be done in more of an urban or technologically advanced society, where there might be more standardized medical records, or you could just contact the hospital and find this information out. So how is that different?

Sagan Friant: 

Yeah, you're exactly right. So a lot of disease surveillance in, I'll speak to Nigeria, but in Africa broadly, is happening in hospital settings. And so this automatically kind of filters who's being surveyed for diseases, to people who report to hospitals. And this means that there are people with severe disease who thought it was important enough to go to a hospital and also that they had access to the hospital, both in terms of good roads and the money that they need to travel there. And so we're missing a lot of the cases, be it Mpox, be it Lassa, across this region. And by doing community-based surveillance and research, we can start to uncover some of those potential risk factors within community settings.

Sam Muller:

Gotcha. Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. And what I find interesting as well, is you talk about community-based projects involving those promoting healthy ecosystems, so making sure that everything is beneficial for as many people as possible. But also, it is interesting to me, how we intervene in communities like this, in an ethical and effective manner. So how have you gone about making sure that's incorporated into your research?

Sagan Friant:

Yeah, I always get a little bit of a cringey feeling as well when I talk about intervening in communities. And so one thing is, especially talking about the Cross River Project, going back to that, I have lived and worked in these communities for 15 years, off and on and through that, have developed a pretty good understanding of the lived experience. My science helps produce evidence to test some of those hypotheses and relationships. And then my relationships with the communities help me to determine what an “appropriate intervention” (I'm using air quotes because it's a podcast) would look like in those communities. 

And so that involves consultation with the community members, both through the research project and including them in the research and using the responses from those interviews to construct what I think are feasible interventions. And then the process shouldn't stop there, then it's about bringing those lists of interventions back to the community. So it could be, I may have a list of 10 things that I think would help reduce disease transmission without having negative consequences for human health, as far as nutrition. And maybe my number one intervention that I think is going to be most effective has so many barriers when presented to the community, that it's actually no longer the top intervention. And maybe it's the fifth or seventh or tenth intervention that is readily adoptable by the community, that then becomes the top intervention because ultimately, it has to be adopted in order for it to succeed. 

And so we've done some projects in the Cross River system that have used some version of that approach, and one of them was a call for funding to disrupt illicit trade networks. And so this was very broad, it could be human trafficking, wildlife, guns and so I pitched that we needed a different approach for combating illicit wildlife trade. And so we developed a project that was disrupting illicit wildlife trade networks through strengthening health and economic networks, to provide the alternatives that people need to have the self-efficacy to enact that change. 

And so a lot of this is inspired by some early public health work that shows, it's not just knowledge that is the barrier to behavior change. So there's a good example of water quality and trying to educate communities about the importance of getting clean water, but it wasn't until they provided women with bicycles to go fetch that clean water that they were actually able to enact change. So it's about giving the community the tools that they need to enact the changes that they see are feasible.

Now, don't ask me how you transport water on a bicycle, that was never explained to me. But I think it's about working with the communities to couple education, which I do think is important, with those tools so that they're equipped to enact change. And I would say, that one of the best interventions that we did, that was completely unintentional, was the construction of our field station within our host community. And that was really funny because I came and found out that a bunch of hunters had been working, being paid per block, those blocks that got washed in the water to construct the house. And this is the enclave community in the middle of the rainforest, people were coming from other communities to help work on the house. 

And just that small incentive, having some handwork, as they call it, to do, was enough to keep hunters out of the forest for the three months or so that it took to build our house. And that wasn't even meant to be an economic alternative measure, but it was enough to show you (me at least) that when given alternative options, that a lot of people will switch to other activities and put the proof in the pudding. (laughs)

MUSICAL INTERLUDE

Sam Muller:

So was this research then, something that was quickly adopted by the community? Were they really excited to have you there or was it something that they were a little bit wary of, coming into it?

Sagan Friant:

Nigerians are very welcoming. I boldly enter a lot of communities with equipment and a research team and show up one day and then ask to stay there for a month to three months, and I've never been turned down, but that's just the early stage. It becomes more challenging trying to sustain those relationships over years. And so I think that the community has really appreciated our presence, not only because of the science and the projects but also the personal relationships that we've developed over the years.

But we also, I try to cycle through. We usually have a large research project followed by some sort of program or intervention or benefit to the community, so that it's not just a one-way relationship that they're giving me information and I'm taking it. I try to use that information to enact programs and sometimes they're directly related to the research and sometimes they are just humanitarian aid. So we put solar in my station, which was the first light that exists in that community, and we coupled that with some light posts throughout the community that could just shine and light up some of the walking paths for people as they walked under them. So just as we build our own project, trying to bring the community with us and help as much as we can.

Sam Muller:

That's awesome. And I'm sure that you can comment on this as well, because you're currently working in the Anthropology department. Were you always working in anthropology? What is your general background?

Sagan Friant:

Yeah, my undergraduate education is in anthropology, but I came at it in a bit of a different way. I came in as a biological anthropologist who was interested in primate disease ecology. So part of this is because my parents took me to the zoo too often when I was little and I wanted to study primates. And then, through following my curiosity, one way or another, I ended up pursuing a degree in anthropology with a focus on primatology and that really got me into primate disease ecology. And ultimately, working in these communities, studying diseases of wildlife was just, only got me so far when I was living and following primates, living in hunting sheds, watching people also hunt primates and the ways they were interacting with them, got me a lot more interested in the spillover process. 

But also, there's a lot of free time in hunting sheds. (laughs) and so there's a lot of hanging out with hunters. This is before I developed my interview skills, but I wish I had had them at that point because the wealth of qualitative data that I was getting at that point. But it really directed my research questions to say, "Hey, this lived experience of a hunter is not reflecting…” I have a background in anthropology and conservation biology. “I not the version of a poacher that I imagined." Right? This is a 15-year-old boy who is back from school, who is hunting a monkey in the forest. So just through talking to hunters, I developed a set of research questions, and I was able to come back and address and that got me more into the human ecology, human anthropology side of things. Then I'll just add to that, that my PhD is in interdisciplinary environmental studies program, in which I was housed in a vet school and that gave me the skills and the tools to do some of the diagnostics for diseases in wildlife, but also in humans and ask questions that allow me to collaborate with people who are more skilled than me in those types of methodologies.

Sam Muller:

Are there any specific collaborations you can think of that you needed to do to make these research projects happen? Maybe something in health or like you said, vets or something like that?

Sagan Friant:

Yeah. My long-term collaboration is with a lot of students from the forestry department in Nigeria, which has been really helpful because they have a good idea of the local wildlife and biodiversity. When we're interviewing people talking about an animal, they may say bush dog, and then we have to take that and figure out what a bush dog is. Right?

And it might be a mongoose and it might be an African civet, depending on the village you are in. So there's a lot of knowledge that you need to have of the local wildlife in order to even implement these kinds of questionnaires. Then I also collaborate with the African Center of Excellence for Genomics of Infectious Disease and so there's a lot of building capacity,  increasing capacity in Nigeria for the laboratory work in general and so this is really a global leader in infectious disease research.

And that laboratory is now doing a lot of the diagnostic testing for known and novel viruses and bacteria that we might find in some of these animals, as well as when we do a project like Lassa, testing the rodents that we capture for Lassa fever virus. And then I also collaborate with local, public health institutions. So the Mpox project is a large collaboration with the Nigeria CDC. And that's been crucial to identifying these cases, developing the correct procedure for following up with cases and entering communities that I've never been to before to ask questions. And then working with some of the trainees from their field epidemiology program, to implement a lot of the research. And they've been excellent so far.

Sam Muller:

That's great. So what do you think some of the big moments that led you to where you are today were? Maybe some frustrations, some breakthroughs, or any “aha” moments that you had at any point?

Sagan Friant:

I can think about these key moments that were not big, they're very small, but in hindsight, they were very life-changing. So one was just the decision to, in high school, to pursue a degree in anthropology because I wanted to study primates. And that was largely the idea of my father who took me to the zoo too often. And actually, the funny thing about that is, we would walk to the zoo because we lived very close and I would be too tired to walk around the zoo, so we would just watch the gorillas. But now that I think about it, I spend just as much time watching the people watch the gorillas, as I watched the gorillas. I've definitely always been an observer. So I think that got me into this anthropology space. And then I remember reading one paper about how primates self-medicate using plants from the forest and how this can rid them of parasitic diseases.

And I was in the back of a car going to a friend’s house for Thanksgiving and reading this and it was just so interesting that I decided I wanted to take a parasitology class in my senior year. And follow that curiosity to do a Master's that was focused on primate parasitology. And then I mentioned the moment in the hunting shed. So these are all small moments, but I think the key there is, that at each moment, I decided to follow my curiosity and take a harder path, than to keep doing what I was doing. And I think that just helps maintain the energy and excitement about the research and your investment in it and has really directed my research over the years.

And then as far as key findings, I've had kind of these broad, some of the findings that I've talked about, about food security and drivers of hunting, but then there's also been these unexpected, surprising things, that in the most beautiful ways, ties everything together. One was a lung fluke that we found in some of the primates I was studying, that was transmitted by primates that were eating crabs. And the example of how you can't come up with hypotheses for some research questions. (laughs)

So, I had a record of coughing as just a health indice of primates and were able to establish that the lung fluke, so this lung parasite was causing the primates to cough. And in parallel interviews with hunters, found out that the hunters were using primate feces as a cure for cough, using the justification of seeing primates cough in the forest as a reason for thinking that this may help to cure cough in humans. And a parallel finding was, we found a botfly like parasite and arid fly in the intracranial space, so next to the brain in a Red River hog.

And that was just through watching hunters butcher this animal, they bisect the heads so that they can share it within the community. And talking to them being like, "What are these worms?" They're like, "Oh, they're always there." And they had a whole story about them, about how the Red River hog is a sentinel for danger, and the flies come out of the nostrils and when they hear a hunter coming, they go back up the nostrils and they communicate that to the animal, that tells it to run away. Right?

And so this tells me that this has been a parasite infecting these animals for a long time. They've developed stories about it. Those stories vary depending on who you ask, in what community, but they always exist. And so we threw one of those in some RNA later and took it back to the lab and it's an undescribed species of parasitic botfly that infects the intracranial space of the Red River hog. And so these nice things that kind of bring it together, the ethnographic component, with the veterinary medicine and human health component, in these just really surprising ways that you could never predict or set out to study. So these are part of larger studies, but these opportunistic findings that came about through them, which I find really exciting.

Sam Muller:

Yeah, that's so great. And that is truly one of the best parts about being in science and being a scientist, is you just answer questions you didn't even know you were asking.

I think that's so great. So in terms of you and your research, what would you say is next for you and your projects?

Sagan Friant:

Yeah, so like the rest of the world, we're living in a post-COVID era and I am trying to do all the projects that I wasn't able to do over the last three years, at once. And so there are three separate projects in three different parts of Nigeria, with now three different research teams because they have to be done simultaneously. And my goal now is to sustain them and to find ways to give back, and they're all community-engaged research. So to continue to try to sustain these projects and give back to the communities in ways that directly relate to the research. So that could be interventions that come out of this. So an example, is in the Lassa project, these rodent reservoirs that I talked about are really important agricultural pests. So if we can find ways to help the communities combat these animals, as agricultural pests and household pets, that's in the community's best interest, that's something that they want to do.

So helping them kind of achieve a target that is based on agricultural and environmental health, but can also have co-benefits for blocking zoonotic disease transmission. So kind of leveraging from these projects to do community programs, test interventions, both social and behavioral change, as well as ecological and landscape-level interventions I don't expect to answer all the questions in these small projects. And certainly, over the next couple of years, while we carry out the field-based research, we'll be developing new ideas and we'll answer a lot of questions, but we'll open up a lot more questions for future research. 

So, I think I have no big plans to move out of this space. It's a very big space with these three projects and just trying to sustain and learn and ultimately, use it to improve human health and block disease transmission and spillover, the process of zoonotic disease transmission within a lot of these areas.

Sam Muller:

Awesome. Yeah, it seems like you're going to be quite busy over the next couple years. And another thing to think about is, what do you see, in terms of the future, of not just your projects, but the general scientific community that's associated with your field?

Sagan Friant:

Yeah, one thing that I've been thinking a lot about lately is…so a lot of my research is very applied. It has implications for human health in areas where we're doing the research, but I've also been thinking about the state of the field and the contributions of anthropology to One Health and emerging infectious disease research. So a lot of the anthropological contributions in the One Health framework are focused on these areas of contact between humans and animals. So how are people contacting these animals? How is that associated with social characteristics, settlement patterns, governance and politics? This is largely the realm, but I think that there's a large and unrealized role of evolutionary anthropology and human ecology in One Health research, that we could really integrate these fields in a way that we're thinking about how humans construct disease systems, not just encroach upon them and contact animals, but our role over a deeper evolutionary history of human interactions with animals in the environment. That thinks about human interactions with rats, for example, since the origins of agriculture and how that has changed the evolutionary ecology of these rodents and hence their behavior and interactions with humans and provided new avenues for disease transmission. 

And I think it's important to think about, I mean, as an anthropologist, human disturbance to the environment and human hunting are central components of what make us human. And so, understanding how those behaviors in rapidly changing environments, both socially and ecologically, are now resulting in what we're seeing. This rise in emerging infectious diseases of zoonotic origin. I think there's a really important role of evolutionary anthropology and human behavioral ecology that can contribute to our understanding of this process more broadly and over larger timescales.

Sam Muller:

Now that is going to be super interesting to hear about and I'm excited for that to come to be. Well, it's been amazing having you on, and I would love to conclude because I think your research and your story is so cool and it's really something to aspire to. I'd love to have our guests give one piece of advice that you would give to a young scientist out there, maybe someone in their undergrad or in high school, who is needing some hope or inspiration for the future.

Sagan Friant:

Yeah, it's a great question. I would tell anyone you know, to be curious and be bold. So be bold in the questions that you ask. Don't be afraid to go against the status quo. And be bold in the approaches that you're going to take to answer those questions, whether it's a new laboratory experiment or entering a new community in the middle of the rainforest. Following that curiosity and being bold and doing that, I think is going to lead to good science and it's going to lead to a fulfilling career because you're following your own curiosity, and that is incredibly motivating.

Sam Muller:

That's amazing, and I definitely keep that in mind. Thank you so much for chatting with me today. It was lovely to talk to you.

Sagan Friant:

Thank you so much.