Data Science Challenges and Opportunities in One Health

A special issue of Pathogens (ISSN 2076-0817). This special issue belongs to the section "Epidemiology of Infectious Diseases".

Deadline for manuscript submissions: closed (15 September 2023) | Viewed by 2655

Special Issue Editors


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Guest Editor
Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, Richland, WA 99352, USA
Interests: training in mathematics; biology; environmental science; geographic information science; plant pathology; bioinformatics
Special Issues, Collections and Topics in MDPI journals

E-Mail Website
Guest Editor
Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, Richland, WA 99354, USA
Interests: data analytics; one health; disease transmission; antimicrobial resistance

E-Mail Website
Guest Editor
Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, Richland, WA 99354, USA
Interests: data science; threat agnostic methods; cheminformatics; one health; explainability

Special Issue Information

Dear Colleagues,

One Health is an integrated, transdisciplinary approach based on the foundational concept that the health of humans, animals, plants, and the environment are all intercorrelated and impacted by the multiscale global ecosystem. Exemplified by the COVID-19 pandemic, a One Health approach is required to successfully achieve early warning for the prediction, prevention, and mitigation of threats to our public health and food security. However, because of the extraordinary intricacies and differing scales across various ecosystem components, a One Health approach inherently contains a variety of complex data science challenges. The heterogeneity of data, data collection methods, reporting methods, and databases available all provide significant hurdles for making available datasets ‘data science ready’. The nuanced interactions between and varying responses to threats by the environment, plants, humans, and animals—and the different scales of interactions and effects—present significant obstacles when developing data science approaches and thus require innovative integration techniques. At the same time, data science has been transformative across research and industry. It provides the ability to gain situational awareness and predictive insight into short- and long-term integrated health outcomes. In this Special Issue, we invite authors to submit research highlighting specific challenges and unique opportunities arising from the use of a One Health, multi-modal data science approach across a variety of applications.

Dr. Lauren Charles
Dr. Samantha Erwin
Dr. Eva Brayfindley
Guest Editors

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Keywords

  • one health
  • data science
  • multi-modal data
  • data integration
  • data analytics

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Published Papers (1 paper)

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Research

10 pages, 2468 KiB  
Article
Challenges and Opportunities in One Health: Google Trends Search Data
by Lauren Wisnieski, Karen Gruszynski, Vina Faulkner and Barbara Shock
Pathogens 2023, 12(11), 1332; https://doi.org/10.3390/pathogens12111332 - 9 Nov 2023
Cited by 2 | Viewed by 1406
Abstract
Google Trends data can be informative for zoonotic disease incidences, including Lyme disease. However, the use of Google Trends for predictive purposes is underutilized. In this study, we demonstrate the potential to use Google Trends for zoonotic disease prediction by predicting monthly state-level [...] Read more.
Google Trends data can be informative for zoonotic disease incidences, including Lyme disease. However, the use of Google Trends for predictive purposes is underutilized. In this study, we demonstrate the potential to use Google Trends for zoonotic disease prediction by predicting monthly state-level Lyme disease case counts in the United States. We requested Lyme disease data for the years 2010–2021. We downloaded Google Trends search data on terms for Lyme disease, symptoms of Lyme disease, and diseases with similar symptoms to Lyme disease. For each search term, we built an expanding window negative binomial model that adjusted for seasonal differences using a lag term. Performance was measured by Root Mean Squared Errors (RMSEs) and the visual associations between observed and predicted case counts. The highest performing model had excellent predictive ability in some states, but performance varied across states. The highest performing models were for Lyme disease search terms, which indicates the high specificity of search terms. We outline challenges of using Google Trends data, including data availability and a mismatch between geographic units. We discuss opportunities for Google Trends data for One Health research, including prediction of additional zoonotic diseases and incorporating environmental and companion animal data. Lastly, we recommend that Google Trends be explored as an option for predicting other zoonotic diseases and incorporate other data streams that may improve predictive performance. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Data Science Challenges and Opportunities in One Health)
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