HuFEID - The Human Factor in Emerging Infectious Diseases
Emerging infectious diseases are a constant threat to humanity - antibiotic resistance is fully or partially causing 4 million deaths every year, the COVID19 pandemic affected the whole world and killed over 7 million people, much more deadly diseases, such as Ebola, lurks in animal reservoirs and can spread among humans at any time.
HuFEID is a interdisciplinary centre dedicated to studying the impact on emerging infectious diseases of human activities - from the level of the individual person to society and governance, and environmental factors such as pollution.
We bring together leading experts in infectious diseases, human and environmental microbiology, metagenomics, chemistry, mathematics, computational biology and artificial intelligence to understand how human activity makes our global society vulnerable to infectious disease threats and what we can do to safeguard society.
HuFEID objectives
Primary objective: To establish a globally leading, interdisciplinary research centre developing and deploying innovative tools and strategies to investigate and mitigate the human impact on emerging infectious diseases and antimicrobial resistance.
Secondary objectives:
- Build models of human behaviour that work across scales, from individual patients to entire populations, and reflect how people respond to policies,
- Integrate behavioural and clinical data to ensure models remain realistic,
- Expand behavioural models to incorporate epidemiological, environmental and demographic data from the Global Burden of Disease study, using our existing frameworks for pathogen emergence, spread and evolution,
- Create predictive models that allows for scenario-based forecasting of human behaviour and environmental conditions to develop risk maps of future pathogen emergence and spread,
- Perform behavioural and clinical studies to test high-priority interventions.
Core hypothesis
HuFEID's core operational hypothesis is that integrating large-scale data on human behaviour, pathogen dynamics across human and environmental systems will improve our ability to predict, understand, and mitigate EID threats.
Summary
Emerging infectious diseases (EID) and antimicrobial resistance (AMR) are among the greatest global health threats, yet current predictive frameworks largely ignore the critical role of human behaviour and governance. HuFEID will pioneer an integrated, interdisciplinary approach to understand and forecast how societal factors - from individual attitudes to institutional capacity - shape pathogen evolution and outbreak dynamics. By combining large-scale genomic surveillance, environmental sampling, and governance analytics with advanced AI-driven modelling, we will develop the first “synthetic society” platform: a data-rich simulation environment linking human behaviour, policy interventions, and pathogen risk. This paradigm shift will enable real-time scenario-based modelling and risk forecasting, guiding evidence-based strategies for pandemic preparedness and AMR mitigation. Leveraging a world-class consortium spanning clinical medicine, governance science, computational science, and global health, HuFEID will position Norway at the forefront of One Health research and deliver transformative tools for policymakers, scientists, and health systems worldwide. Our centre will build on our consortium’s several decades of research experience that, so far, has attracted approximately 1 billion NOK funding and resulted in over 360 000 citations in high-impact scientific journals.