On 1 March 2023, the first Beatriu de Pinós fellow from the Global Health Resilience group, Raquel Martins Lana, started her project on climate-sensitive diseases. Beatriu de Pinós, funded by the EU Framework Programme for Research and Innovation 2021-2027 (Horizon Europe), is a grant to incorporate postdoctoral research staff into the Catalan science and technology system, supporting them in their long-term Personal Career Development Plan. 

Raquel has a background in quantitative epidemiology, focusing on vector-borne diseases. As part of her project, she aims to synthesise statistical models to better understand the complex interactions of climate, environment, and socioeconomic factors on vector and water-borne diseases (VBD and WBD) dynamics. 

The main goal of the project is to develop novel predictive modelling tools to increase resilience to VBD and WBD risks, given scenarios of co-circulation of multiple diseases determined by the disease introduction, expansion, extinction and/or shift into new areas. To reach this goal, she will extend the epidemiological dengue regime classification (endemic, epidemic, epidemic/episodic and episodic) proposed by de Almeida et al. (2022) to other diseases adapting the epidemiological indexes called “epi-features”, taking into account the disease characteristics. After that, Raquel will investigate how environmental drivers, such as climate and land-use change, interact with socio-economic drivers and disease dynamics to determine the epidemiological disease regimes. 

The time and space resolution of health, climate, environmental and socioeconomic data are different and linking them is one of the challenges for researchers and the most demanding step. The project will benefit from HARMONIZE's digital tools infrastructure for data curation, organisation, and harmonisation.

The findings of the project are intended to support policymakers in designing long-term strategies to proactively seize opportunities to prevent VBD and WBD and reduce the costs and negative health impacts of these infectious diseases. Understanding in depth the environmental and socioeconomic drivers of these diseases and their respective weights by region will allow researchers and policy-makers to optimise health protection strategies.