Food security and economic security are vulnerable to the consequences of new, emerging, or trans-boundary animal diseases reaching the United States and spreading rapidly through food animal populations, triggering export market closures, and raising concerns about food safety. Preparing for such a disaster is a complex challenge. Because of human resistance to preparing for something that is not part of one’s individual experience or the collective experience of one’s social network, developing and maintaining protocols and policies effective at preventing the spread of disease is difficult. The USDA NIFA has awarded a Coordinated Agricultural Project grant to a multi-institutional multi-disciplinary team willing to take on this challenge by focusing on its human behavioral dimensions. The title of the project is “A human behavioral approach to reducing the impact of livestock pest or disease incursions of socio-economic importance.” Unofficially, we call it the Animal Disease Biosecurity Coordinated Agricultural Project (ADB CAP).
More information about project collaborators, activities, and outputs can be found at agbiosecurityproject.org.
This material is based upon work that is supported by the National Institute of Food and Agriculture, U.S. Department of Agriculture, under award number 2015-69004-23273. Any opinions, findings, conclusions, or recommendations expressed in this publication are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the view of the U.S. Department of Agriculture.
