of wildlife to areas of marked habitat fragmentation across the Western Ghats states to develop wildlife surveillance infrastructure under the ‘One Health’ approach at the taluk (sub-district) level across the states.
Spread by infected ticks, the KFD affects people typically living and working in the Western Ghats, presumably due to greater human exposure to infected animals and ticks during January to June, before the onset of the monsoon. Haemaphysalis spinigera ticks are identified as the main vector. A wide range of small rodents, monkeys and birds are thought to play a role in Kyasanur Forest Disease Virus (KFDV) transmission. The disease first emerged in Kyasanur in Karnataka’s Shimoga/Shivamogga district in 1957 after the forest ecosystem was increasingly degraded by human activities.
Since 2012 the disease has spread to new districts in Karnataka and neighbouring states of Tamil Nadu, Goa, Maharashtra, and Kerala in the Western Ghats. Researchers at ICMR-National Institute of Virology (ICMR-NIV) chalk up the KFDV spread between states to movements of tick-infested monkeys in these forests along with changes in agricultural and occupational practices that encourage the proximity to humans and/or their dwellings.
Prashanth N. Srinivas at the Institute of Public Health, Bengaluru, who was not associated with the study adds that the results are not surprising but they are important. The findings are also broadly in line with a paper co-authored by Srinivas on predicting disease risk areas in Shivamogga district in Karnataka. It echoes that creation of habitat mosaics, when the forest is removed for paddy cultivation and plantations, precipitates the emergence of the KFD in humans.
“One of the primary factors that valuable for prediction is the change in purpose for which the land is used which typically happens for mega projects such as road construction or felling forest for rubber plantations versus small scale impacts that traditional forest dwellers have on the forest because they have a more organic relationship with the forest built on longterm association with the area,” Srinivas told Mongabay-India.
Template for ‘One Health’
The Western Ghats has lost evergreen forest cover from 16 to 11 percent from 1985–2018 due to human-caused actions. A simulation published in 2019 predicts the region will have merely 10 percent evergreen cover (in protected areas) in 10 years with agriculture (17 percent), plantations (40 percent) and built-up area (five percent) shaping the landscape in the future. In a recent publication, more than 200 medical journals warned that health is already being harmed by global temperature increases and the destruction of the natural world, a state of affairs health professionals have been bringing attention to for decades.
In 2019, India launched its One Health initiative, an intersectoral approach to tackling the most urgent health threats in the region, with a focus on low and middle-income countries across the south and southeast Asia and sub-Saharan Africa, based on WHO’s framework on the approach.
For the One Health approach to work on the ground, Srinivas argues for a working model. “We have been struggling with One Health on the ground while it is widely used in global literature. The human health department has not sufficiently engaged with the One Health approach; we have to convey what it is in a more meaningful way to make it practical for people on the ground.”
“We need working models of this surveillance within the rural districts where One Health is put into practice. It needs a template. For example, it could involve setting up a secretary-level committee for each state which meets every year to review a priority list of diseases for that state,” adds Srinivas.
He also emphasised an ecological approach to One Health, for example, a One Health committee for the Western Ghats, Trans-Himalayas and other landscapes could be set up to drum up necessary attention.
Kiran S.K., deputy director (KFD Nodal officer) of Virus Diagnostic Laboratory, Shivamogga, Karnataka explains that coo