South African miners face an epidemic of occupational lung diseases. Despite a plethora of research on the mining industry, and the gold mining industry in particular, research impact (including disease surveillance) on policy implementation and occupational health systems performance lags. We describe the gold mining environment, and research on silicosis, tuberculosis, HIV and AIDS, and compensation for occupational disease including initiatives to influence policy and thus reduce dust levels and disease. As these have been largely unsuccessful, we identify possible impediments, some common to other low-and middle-income countries, to the translation of research findings and policy initiatives into effective interventions.
With the decrease of biodiversity worldwide coinciding with an increase in disease outbreaks, investigating this link is more important then ever before. This review outlines the different modelling methods commonly used for pathogen transmission in animal host systems. There are a multitude of ways a pathogen can invade and spread through a host population. The assumptions of the transmission model used to capture disease propagation determines the outbreak potential, the net reproductive success (R0). This review offers an insight into the assumptions and motivation behind common transmission mechanisms and introduces a general framework with which contact rates, the most important parameter in disease dynamics, determines the transmission method. By using a general function introduced here and this general transmission model framework, we provide a guide for future disease ecologists for how to pick the contact function that best suites their system. Additionally, this manuscript attempts to bridge the gap between mathematical disease modelling and the controversially and heavily debated disease-diversity relationship, by expanding the summarized models to multiple hosts systems and explaining the role of host diversity in disease transmission. By outlining the mechanisms of transmission into a stepwise process, this review will serve as a guide to model pathogens in multi-host systems. We will further describe these models it in the greater context of host diversity and its effect on disease outbreaks, by introducing a novel method to include host species’ evolutionary history into the framework.
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