Remember the beginning of the Covid-19 pandemic? (How could you forget, right?)
The illness has so far caused 1.2 million deaths in the US, according to the World Health Organization, and cost the national economy an estimated $16 trillion to date. Not to mention long Covid and the ongoing mental health effects, especially on younger people.
Hospitals took a financial hit due to Covid as well and have faced ongoing challenges in the years since the WHO declared Covid-19 a pandemic, including staffing shortages and a rise in patient violence.
Addressing socioeconomic challenges may be one of the best ways to prevent infectious disease outbreaks and pandemics, according to a study from the University of Georgia and Oklahoma State University.
“Understanding some of the factors that lead to disease outbreaks is really important because we want to understand how to control them, how to manage them, how to prevent them,” Payton Phillips, lead author on the study and postdoctoral researcher at the University of Georgia, told Healthcare Brew.
Breaking it down. To conduct the research, Phillips and her team looked at the 100 biggest outbreaks of zoonotic pathogens, or diseases spread through animals, like tuberculosis, plague, and salmonella between 1977 and 2017.
The team pulled information from the Gideon Pathogen Database, which tracks disease online across the world. They also used previous research by Patrick Stephens, assistant professor at Oklahoma State, another author on the study, to reach their conclusions.
Navigate the healthcare industry
Healthcare Brew covers pharmaceutical developments, health startups, the latest tech, and how it impacts hospitals and providers to keep administrators and providers informed.
Stephens’s research pulled the 100 biggest diseases, and in this more recent study, the researchers broke each down by 48 different disease drivers—like food and water contamination, livestock production, sewage management, and deforestation—and sorted them into either environmental or socioeconomic factors.
Fear disease factor. They found environmental factors like climate change, weather patterns, and natural disasters were more likely to cause viral diseases. Meanwhile, socioeconomic factors like antibiotic use, contaminated water and food, sewage management, and public health infrastructure were more likely to cause bacterial outbreaks.
The data showed a large outbreak was more likely to be bacterial if a socioeconomic condition was reported compared with an ecological condition.
“But then we ended up finding an interesting pattern where the viral outbreaks would end up being bigger if there were more socioeconomic drivers,” Phillips said. “So they weren’t triggered by those socioeconomic things, but they would grow because of them.”
One of her key takeaways from the research, Phillips said, was that addressing socioeconomic factors is key to preventing disease.
“Preventing that from the get-go would save a lot of lives, probably save a lot of money, and at least prevent people from getting sick,” she said.