The United Nations has 17 goals for worldwide sustainable development, which run the gamut from clean water to zero hunger to affordable, clean energy. Scientists have tended to work on just one or possibly two of those goals during the course of their research, focusing on their own specialties.
But University of Notre Dame biologist Jason Rohr and his team don’t think that way. The Ludmilla F., Stephen J., and Robert T. Galla College Professor and Chair of the Department of Biological Sciences was one of three winners of the 2024 Frontiers Planet Prize for his research that tackles several of the United Nations’ goals, helping to improve public health, agriculture, sustainability, and poverty in Senegal.
“People tend to be in their silos ... so I don’t know that many are making a whole lot of progress on those goals because of the nature in which they’re being tackled,” Rohr said. “We're acknowledging the fact that these 17 Sustainable Development Goals intersect in many ways. For example, disease and a lack of adequate food, energy, and water all contribute to poverty. Our project embraces these interconnections.”
Published in Nature in 2023, Rohr’s research focuses on reducing schistosomiasis, a parasitic disease affecting more than 250 million people worldwide that causes organ damage and death, and is transmitted to humans from freshwater snails that are infected with parasitic flatworms.
The snails that transmit the flatworm prefer to live in vegetation that proliferates partially because of fertilizer runoff. “People can become infected multiple times when using waterways for washing and leisure,” Rohr said. Symptoms begin with a rash and progress to several areas, depending on how the worms and their larvae migrate through the body. The disease can affect the liver, spleen, lungs, brain, or intestines.
In his work, Rohr and collaborators study more than ways to reduce disease. Their interdisciplinary approach includes removing snail-loving vegetation at water access points, composting the vegetation, feeding the vegetation to livestock, and providing economic opportunities from the profitable compost and livestock feed.
During the course of the research, Rohr and his team have had collaborative relationships with the village chiefs and the villagers in Senegal. He has recruited farmers for crop trials to determine crop yields, and, in separate studies, he recruited rice farmers to count and weigh fish after draining their fields.
There are now 116 villages in Rohr’s current trial. The residents are receiving extension training and videos to not only learn how to remove the vegetation from their villages, but also to learn how it will help them in the fight against schistosomiasis.
Rohr became interested in tackling schistosomiasis and snails that transmit the disease during his work with amphibians. At first he studied amphibian behavior and then shifted to infectious diseases of amphibians, which are the most threatened vertebrate taxon on the globe. In 2008 he published a paper in Nature on the effect of agricultural chemicals on the trematode (flatworm) infections in frogs.
“After we published that work, I got really interested in whether similar phenomena were occurring in humans—and the human analog (for a similar worm) is schistosomiasis,” he said. “We showed similar patterns with many of the agrochemicals and then jumped into more solution-oriented studies.”
Rohr is scaling up his research—moving from a small area in Senegal to the rest of the country and then into Western Africa. Not only is his team pursuing the program of voluntary removal of vegetation, but they are working with corporations and entrepreneurs that may have mechanized equipment to remove the vegetation. People at the companies would also be trained to use remote sensing technology to track regrowth of the vegetation in real time.
“Hopefully one or both of these approaches will work to scale this innovation and give the people of Africa the tools to liberate themselves from poverty-disease traps,” Rohr said.
Learn more about the United Nations’ 17 Sustainable Development Goals.
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Story by Deanna Csomo Ferrell