Frontiers in Veterinary Medicine (FIVM) Seminar Series presents:

Many communities in low- and middle-income countries globally lack sustainable, cost-effective, mutually beneficial solutions for infectious disease, food, energy, water, sustainability, and poverty challenges, despite their inherent interdependence. On Friday, March 15, Dr. Jason Rohr will describe two complementary approaches that could help to alleviate poverty-disease traps.  The first describes how mass drug administration to treat the five major worm infections of humans eliminates calories lost to these worms and can save massive amounts of food globally. He will also provide support for the hypothesis that agricultural development and fertilizer use in West Africa increase the burden of the parasitic disease schistosomiasis by fueling the growth of submerged aquatic vegetation that chokes out water access points and serves as habitat for freshwater snails that transmit Schistosoma parasites to >200 million people globally. When submerged vegetation was removed from the water points in 8 out of 16 villages, Schistosoma infection rates were reduced in schoolchildren from these villages. The removed vegetation was used for livestock feed or converted to compost – both with high benefit to cost ratios, thus yielding an economic incentive with important public health co-benefits – maintain cleared waterways and return nutrients captured in aquatic plants back to agriculture with the promise of breaking poverty disease traps. By offering rare, profitable, win-win approaches to addressing food and water access, poverty alleviation, infectious disease control, and environmental sustainability, Dr. Rohr hopes to inspire the interdisciplinary search for planetary health solutions to the numerous and formidable, co-dependent global grand challenges of the 21st century. 

Dr. Jason Rohr is the Ludmilla F., Stephen J., and Robert T. Galla College Professor of Biological Sciences at the University of Notre Dame (UND), chair of the Department of Biological Science, Co-Director of the Center for Rare and Neglected Diseases, and elected fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. He is a leader in understanding how anthropogenic change impacts human, animal, and ecosystem health. Since 2001, he has published >200 peer-reviewed papers, and acquired and managed over $16 million in grant funds from more than five US federal agencies. 

Dr. Rohr's research interests are extremely diverse. While attempting to tackle poverty in Africa with an active clinical trial on a neglected tropical disease that leverages crop and livestock production, he also has several active studies on the effects of climate change and biodiversity loss on vector-borne and directly transmitted infectious diseases, chemical contaminants and animal and ecosystem health, and understanding and curbing worldwide amphibian declines. Dr. Rohr is motivated by finding "win-win" solutions to the many grand challenges facing societies today.