The research project of the Animal Epidemiology Research Unit focuses on understanding how the diversity of hosts, pathogens and environments interact to impact the dynamics of diseases in wild and domestic animal populations in a global change context.
Our investigations include pathogens or diseases which are of public health or animal health interest: among others, tick-borne bacterial diseases (eg Lyme disease, Anaplasmosis), directly transmitted bacterial diseases (eg Q fever) virus infections such as West-Nile virus, Puumala hantavirus, African horse sickness or prion diseases (e.g. mad-cow disease).

Beyond the specific questions posed for each pathogen/disease model investigated, we address two major questions in epidemiology. First, how does the diversity of hosts and/or pathogens modify the transmission of pathogens? Second, does global change (that is environmental changes as well as changes in human land use or agricultural practices) impact the transmission of pathogens?
These researches require interdisciplinary work, crossing several scientific fields (mainly epidemiology, ecology and evolution but also statistics and molecular biology). The team includes these different skills and develop various collaborations with other research units in these fields. The 6 people involved in the Ecofect project are involved in epidemiology, ecology, modelling, biochemistry and molecular epidemiology.

Key words: tick-borne diseases, hantavirus, epidemiology, ecology, animal disease