Abstract

When animal disease occurs within human settlements, coordinated community response is an important element in any official control or eradication strategy. Yet communities’ capacity for cooperative response is strongly influenced by preexisting social, economic and political factors. This paper presents some lessons from an animal disease control effort on the manner in which community organization can be incorporated into effective animal disease response.

Exotic Newcastle disease (END), a virulent poultry viral disease, broke out in southern California in 2002–2003. While the outbreak included a number of commercial poultry facilities, it was initially found in backyard birds in urban and suburban communities. Within these communities, commercial, backyard, pet, and wild bird populations exist close proximity to one another. As a function of the region’s diverse cultural landscape, bird owners, ethnic groups, and enterprises have quite different social and economic agendas for their animals.

This study looks at the way in which four communities in southern California responded to the outbreak of END and a government effort for its eradication. It examines critical variables in each community for developing a capacity for social biosecurity for animal disease. These are the variables that largely determine the degree of community cooperation with animal disease control strategies.

Crucial variables include basic demographics of the community, preexisting relations with authorities, attitudes and practices regarding birds and animals, and settlement patterns. It describes how some official actions and politics of outside authorities tended to foster cooperation and how others tended to exacerbate conflict. Finally, it makes recommendations on the way in which official disease control strategies can seek to incorporate community dynamics into a design for social biosecurity related to animal diseases.