title: Contact structure, mobility, environmental impact and behaviour: the importance of social forces to infectious disease dynamics and disease ecology.
abstract: Human factors, including contact structure, movement, impact on the environment and patterns of behaviour, can have significant influence on the emergence of novel infectious diseases and the transmission and amplification of established ones. As anthropogenic climate change alters natural systems and global economic forces drive land-use and land-cover change, it becomes increasingly important to understand both the ecological and social factors that impact infectious disease outcomes for human populations. While the field of disease ecology explicitly studies the ecological aspects of infectious disease transmission, the effects of the social context on zoonotic pathogen spillover and subsequent human-to-human transmission are comparatively neglected in the literature. The social sciences encompass a variety of disciplines and frameworks for understanding infectious diseases; however, here we focus on four primary areas of social systems that quantitatively and qualitatively contribute to infectious diseases as social-ecological systems. These areas are social mixing and structure, space and mobility, geography and environmental impact, and behaviour and behaviour change. Incorporation of these social factors requires empirical studies for parametrization, phenomena characterization and integrated theoretical modelling of social-ecological interactions. The social-ecological system that dictates infectious disease dynamics is a complex system rich in interacting variables with dynamically significant heterogeneous properties. Future discussions about infectious disease spillover and transmission in human populations need to address the social context that affects particular disease systems by identifying and measuring qualitatively important drivers.This article is part of the themed issue 'Opening the black box: re-examining the ecology and evolution of parasite transmission'.
authors.affiliation: Emmett Interdisciplinary Program in Environment and Resources, Stanford University, Stanford, CA 94305, USA rarthur@stanford.edu.
authors.forename: Ronan F
authors.identifier: http://orcid.org/0000-0001-8513-8348
authors.initials: RF
authors.lastname: Arthur
authors.affiliation: Department of Epidemiology, Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, MD 21205, USA.|International Centre for Diarrhoeal Diseases Research, Bangladesh (ICDDR, B), Dhaka, Bangladesh.
authors.forename: Emily S
authors.initials: ES
authors.lastname: Gurley
authors.affiliation: Department of Epidemiology, Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, MD 21205, USA.|Mathematical Modelling of Infectious Diseases Unit, Institut Pasteur, Paris, France.
authors.forename: Henrik
authors.identifier: http://orcid.org/0000-0003-3626-4254
authors.initials: H
authors.lastname: Salje
authors.affiliation: Emmett Interdisciplinary Program in Environment and Resources, Stanford University, Stanford, CA 94305, USA.|Stanford University School of Medicine, Stanford, CA 94305, USA.
authors.forename: Laura S P
authors.identifier: http://orcid.org/0000-0003-0416-3440
authors.initials: LS
authors.lastname: Bloomfield
authors.affiliation: Department of Earth Systems Science, Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, MD 21205, USA.|Department of Life Sciences, Imperial College London, London, UK.
authors.forename: James H
authors.identifier: http://orcid.org/0000-0003-1680-6757
authors.initials: JH
authors.lastname: Jones
mesh_terms: D000818:Animals; D005075:Biological Evolution; D057231:Climate Change; D003141:Communicable Diseases / Q000635:transmission*; D006790:Host-Parasite Interactions; D006801:Humans; D015047:Zoonoses / Q000635:transmission*
keywords: complex systems; disease ecology; heterogeneity; infectious disease dynamics; social sciences; social–ecological systems