The social dimension of animal health surveillance system: an interdisciplinary approach of social pressure in the process of disease reporting in Northern Thailand.

In the framework of the CIRAD REVASIA research program, aimed at the improvement of methods for the evaluation of animal health surveillance systems, a interdisciplinary approach has been designed for addressing surveillance‘s social factors at local level. To that purpose, methodological inputs from epidemiology, economics and anthropology have been merged together in order to provide an innovative methodological pathway for the assessment and quantification of these factors at community level.
Regarding the onset of the desired interdisciplinary approach, the first step was to bring the researchers into several brainstorming sessions aimed at defining a shared scientific and operational objective for this study. It was decided to settle two field sites in two different political, economical and social contexts: one in Vietnam and one in Thailand. Then, the next step was to bring all the concerned researchers into a common workshop dealing with participatory approaches applied to epidemiology. One of the main outcomes was to allow for the handling by the investigators of basic participatory investigation and visualization tools (mapping, diagrams, proportional piling, etc.) and qualitative data gathering. Then, the two field inquiry’s protocols were designed on the economical process at play in the field of livestock and animal health and the social and socio-­‐political dynamics at the community level. This communication will focus on the Thailand study, showing how an anthropology-­‐based study of the social, economical and political process in the community can highlight behavior rules in the context of animal diseases reporting.
Indeed, the decision-­‐making process for reporting or not reporting a disease has been considered beyond the individual, as the result of a body of community influences referring to social factors. Thus, we have gone through a better understanding of (1) the community’s functioning patterns, (2) power relationships at play and social stakeholders’ networks and interactions (economical stakes, land tenure issues, political control etc.). In parallel, we showed some trends for health management practices and knowledge. The outputs of this study were an analysis of the social pressure that the stakeholders are subjected to in the framework of animal health management, a better understanding of the animal health information spreading scheme, and a typology of social stakeholders regarding surveillance. The research process, even if focusing on social and anthropological dynamics at play was interdisciplinary from the very beginning, merging together qualitative participatory investigation methods from sociology and economics, modeling and computer sciences, and epidemiology. Thus, pathways of individual motivation for reporting, based on social types, have been provided in order to highlight behavior rules associated to animal health surveillance systems.