What makes or breaks a campaign to stop an invading plant pathogen?

Abstract

Diseases in humans, animals and plants remain an important challenge in our society. Effective control of invasive pathogens often requires coordinated concerted action of a large group of stakeholders. Both epidemiological and human behavioural factors influence the outcome of a disease control campaign. In mathematical models that are frequently used to guide such campaigns, human behaviour is often ill-represented, if at all. Existing models of human, animal and plant disease that do incorporate participation or compliance are often driven by pay-offs or direct observations of the disease state. It is however very well known that opinion is an important driving factor of human decision making. Here we consider the case study of Citrus Huanglongbing disease (HLB), which is an acute bacterial disease that threatens the sustainability of citrus production across the world. We show how by coupling an epidemiological model of this invasive disease with an opinion dynamics model we are able to answer the question: What makes or breaks the effectiveness of a disease control campaign? Frequent contact between stakeholders and advisors is shown to increase the probability of successful control. More surprisingly, we show that informing stakeholders about the effectiveness of control methods is of much greater importance than prematurely increasing their perceptions of the risk of infection. We discuss the overarching consequences of this finding and the effect on human as well as plant disease epidemics.

Global challenges facing plant pathology: multidisciplinary approaches to meet the food security and environmental challenges in the mid-twenty-first century

“…Citizen science programs can be designed to improve detection and increase awareness of plant health problems, an example of this process can be found in Colorado, US, where volunteers are asked to help map host (ash tree) distributions in advance of pest arrival (Agrilus planipennis) (Alexander et al 2020). The role of land user and stake holder participation in the detection and management of plant health issues is a key area for future research (Brown et al 2017;Milne et al 2020) as their decisions can influence the outcome of management and eradication programs: an issue found to be of considerable importance for tree crops in the UK (Marzano et al 2015(Marzano et al , 2019.…”

How growers make decisions impacts plant disease control

“… Bauch and Earn ( 2004 ); reviewed in Chang et al ( 2020 )) and animal (e.g. Delabouglise and Boni ( 2020 ), Mohr et al ( 2020 )) diseases, though there have been fewer studies for plant diseases ( Milne et al ( 2016 ), McQuaid et al ( 2017a ), Szyniszewska et al ( 2019 ), Milne et al ( 2020 ), Bate et al ( 2021 )). Where studies do consider individual growers’ decisions there is little justification of how decision-making is modelled, although it clearly will affect the outcomes of their decisions.…”

Diaphorina citri Genome Possesses a Complete Melatonin Biosynthesis Pathway Differentially Expressed under the Influence of the Phytopathogenic Bacterium, Candidatus Liberibacter asiaticus

“…Recently, HLB turns out to be the most serious challenge for the citrus industry in Florida particularly, and the USA in general [ 5 ]. Diminishing the disease spread rate via reduction of vector populations has become one of the top priorities for the citrus industry, in California particularly, and in all citrus-growing areas generally [ 6 , 7 , 8 ].…”