The anthropological study of zoonotic diseases

Professor Christos Lynteris' research has been pioneering the anthropological study of zoonotic diseases since 2006. Over a number of projects, funded by Wellcome Trust, the UKRI, the British Academy and the ERC, Christos has explored the formation of epidemiological frameworks of zoonosis and the socioecological drivers of different zoonotic diseases across the globe. His work is committed to bringing together critical understandings of the impact of zoonotic frameworks on social and multispecies relations and community-led, decolonised, and ecologically-sensitive approaches to zoonosis control.

Christos is a member of the Working Group on Behavioural Interventions and Community Engagement of the Standing Committee on Pandemic Preparedness, reporting to the Scottish Government. He advised the House of Lords Covid-19 Committee (Life Beyond Covid), and his research on anti-epidemic masks has had a global impact, including relevant legislation in Mexico. He is also an advisor to the Centre for Pandemic Risk Management of the University of Cambridge and to numerous zoonosis-related research projects across the globe across the disciplines.

Christos is currently the Co-Investigator of the UKRI-funded project Improving the Detection of Emerging Zoonotic Pathogens in Forest Fringe Populations (led by University Hospitals Plymouth NHS Trust) which works with Indigenous communities in Sulawesi (Indonesia) and Sarawak (Malaysia) to co-design and co-develop decentralised spatio-temporal community-sampling for febrile illnesses in forest-fringe settings.

Christos was the Co-Investigator of an MRC-funded project on Developing Effective Rodent Control Strategies to Reduce Disease Risk in Ecologically and Culturally Diverse Rural Landscapes which aimed at reducing risk from rodent-borne plague and leptospirosis in rural Madagascar and Tanzania respectively, and improve health and well-being by increasing the capacity to develop rodent-control measures that are sustainable and resilient given local ecological, epidemiological, agricultural and socio-cultural contexts.

Christos has organised and contributed to photographic exhibitions around the world on epidemic diseases through his ERC project Visual Representations of the Third Plague Pandemic. An example being the online exhibition on the subject of "Controlling the Plague in British India: A Visual History of the Plague" at Science Gallery Bengaluru's new platform "Contagion".

His project "The Global War Against the Rat and the Epistemic Emergence of Zoonosis" (2019-2024), funded by the Wellcome Trust with an Investigator Award in the Humanities and Social Sciences, examined the global history of a foundational but historically neglected process in the development of scientific approaches of zoonosis: the global war against the rat (1898-1948). The project has received global media coverage and is featured in the documentary film DIS-EASE (dir. Mariam Ghani) which premiered at the Tate Modern in August 2024.

Christos' co-authored monograph Sulphuric Utopias: A History of Maritime Fumigation (MIT Press, 2020), was listed by The Guardian among thirty books to help us understand the world in 2020.