- Population density
- Migration
- Trade
- Sanitation
- Access to clean water

Human Factors that Influence Disease Epidemiology

Social factors mainly leads to health inequality, which could enhance disease transmission patterns and rates.
- Socioeconomic status
- Housing
- Race
- Ethnicity
- Gender
- Education

Social Factors that Influence Disease Epidemiology

- Poor housing leads to proliferation of insect and rodent vector-borne diseases.

- Inadequate water supplies leads to water-borne diseases such as cholera.

- Lack of sanitation facilities and waste management creates breeding ground for pathogens.

- Lack of ventilation systems leads to respiratory tract infections.

- High density of inhabitants can increase the spread of infectious diseases.


Relationship between Living Conditions and Health Risks

Rapid urbanization has multiple impacts on disease epidemiology, which is the distribution, patterns, and determinants of health and disease conditions in a population. Two categories of these factors are:
- Human factors
- Social factors

University of California, Davis

Urbanization refers to an increased movement and settling of people in urban surroundings. Rapid urbanization leads to the development of heterogeneous living environments, such as slums, shanty towns, and wealthy neighborhoods. The differences between these environments can pose several health risks, which leads to an increase of infectious diseases in urban environments.

Urbanization and Epidemiology

Hassell, James M, et al. “Urbanization and Disease Emergence: Dynamics at the Wildlife-Livestock-Human Interface.” Trends in Ecology &amp; Evolution, Elsevier Science Publishers, Jan. 2017, https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5214842/. 

Urbanization and Disease Emergence: Dynamics at the Wildlife-Livestock-Human Interface.

Urbanization Effects that Influence Disease Epidemiology

Before urbanization, the interaction between wildlife, livestock, and human is less frequent because the territories of wildlife and humans rarely overlaps. However, urbanization forced wildlife to flee from their territories or reside with the human population. Such fragmentation of natural biomes due to urbanization led to a mix of habitats and consequences that changed disease epidemiology. Two of which are:
- Creation of ecotones
- Resource Provisioning

Changes in the Wildlife-Livestock-Human Interface in Urban Landscape

- Establish characterizations for potential high-risk interfaces that exist along gradient of urbanization and identify processes that led to their formation
- Describe the biological organization and community ecology at these interfaces, conduct surveillance for priority zoonotic pathogens and study the evolutionary processes underlying cross-species transmission
- Develop appropriate interventions that can be used to reduce risk of transmission



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