ZOOJEU turns Q fever control into a farm-level conversation
A participatory tool built around a serious game reframes Q fever control as a lived farm problem rather than a narrow veterinary checklist. The ZOOJEU framework organizes that work into three linked steps: sharing a narrative through a comic strip, sharing grammar through the game itself, and sharing experiment through a multistakeholder workshop that produces new shared perspectives. The design is aimed at the messy space where livestock farmers must navigate both the biological world of disease and the social world of regulation, trade, and daily production pressures.
The structure is deliberately concrete. Players first describe the farm they know, then work through a goat-farm setting laid out on a large board, then respond to an outbreak scenario marked by an abnormal cluster of abortions over one week. From there, the game shifts from description to judgment: what matters most on the farm, what creates vulnerability, and which policy failures leave farmers exposed when infection pressure rises.
A game board built around the realities of farm life
The visual framework places farmers inside two overlapping “worlds.” One world is cyclical and slow, shaped by seasons, reproduction, animals, microbes, and death; the other is short-term and crisis-driven, shaped by emergencies, market adjustments, and regulatory constraints. In practice, livestock farmers inhabit both at once. A goat herd can be managed according to breeding cycles and routine husbandry, yet a single abortion outbreak can instantly pull the farm into inspection, reporting, and containment mode.
That tension is central to the intervention. The game board uses a large printed mat with repeated circles representing broad conditions that affect every farm, including climate change, inflation, economic crises, fossil fuels, regulatory complexity, and microbes. Separate moveable shapes represent the practical elements of daily life: technical tools, means of production, social and economic organizations, neighbors, bank loans, and the microbial hazards that cannot be ignored. The unfinished nature of the board is intentional. Players fill in what matters to them, which keeps the exercise anchored in local reality rather than in an abstract policy script.
This matters because Q fever control is not just about a pathogen. It is also about whether farm infrastructure, market pressures, and local relationships leave room for biosecurity measures to be adopted and maintained. A policy that ignores labor, debt, production models, or sales channels can be technically correct and still fail at the point of implementation.
Abortions on the farm expose the gaps in policy and practice
Once the outbreak scenario is introduced, the game moves from general farm identity to a sharper clinical and organizational question: what happens when abortions rise suddenly? In the board sequence, players choose cardboard figures representing objects, stakeholders, and practices. These are used to examine who or what drives the situation on the farm, what fosters security or vulnerability, and which health policy failures might be repaired.
The scenario is not presented as a detached exercise. It is built around an outbreak pattern that goat farmers immediately recognize as consequential, because reproductive loss is among the clearest and most disruptive signs of herd-level disease pressure. When abortions cluster over a short period, the consequences extend well beyond the sick animal. Milk production, market timing, farm labor, public health reporting, and trust in the system all come under strain at once.
One sharp feature of the approach is its refusal to reduce disease control to a single axis. Biosecurity appears alongside alternative therapeutic or healthcare practices, and policy is treated as something that can fail in multiple ways. The game therefore creates a setting where participants can question not only what is happening biologically, but also how institutions respond when the farm falls outside neat administrative categories.
Stakeholder dialogue replaces one-way instruction
The workshop element is where the framework changes from a representation of farm life into a negotiation over meaning. Players are invited to place figures individually on the boards to encourage mutual acquaintance and discussion. That format supports direct exchange between perspectives that often remain separated in ordinary outbreak response: farmers, health officials, veterinary actors, and public health stakeholders.
Several farm contexts are built into the case study material, including indoor-only farming versus outdoor exercise access, milk-only production versus milk plus raw milk cheese sales, organic versus conventional systems, and farms with additional production facilities. Those differences are not decorative. They shape exposure, workflow, and the degree to which disease control can be integrated into ordinary production. A biosecurity recommendation that works for one structure may be poorly fitted to another, especially when the farm combines animal care with on-site processing or direct sales.
The workshop also functions as a diagnostic for policy language. What counts as risk, what counts as responsibility, and what counts as an acceptable intervention are all open to renegotiation in the game setting. In a disease such as Q fever, where animal health and human health intersect, this kind of shared framing can be more useful than a single-direction advisory memo.
Policy failure becomes visible when the people asked to carry out control measures cannot recognize themselves in the policy design.
Why this approach fits Q fever control
Q fever sits at the crossroads of veterinary medicine, occupational risk, and public health. The disease involves microbes that move through animal production systems and can affect people who work around infected livestock. A control strategy that ignores the farm’s social organization may describe the hazard correctly while missing the actual route by which prevention fails. ZOOJEU addresses that gap by making farm realities visible before asking participants to imagine change.
The framework also reflects an important clinical truth: outbreak response is rarely a purely technical act. On a goat farm, decisions about isolation, reproduction, sales, housing, and reporting are entangled with family labor, economics, and local institutions. By asking players to map those entanglements, the game tries to surface the real barriers to control rather than assuming that good advice automatically leads to good behavior.
The figures and workshop design point to a broader use of participatory methods in neglected zoonoses. When prevention depends on cooperation across sectors, the first task is often not education in the narrow sense. It is shared recognition of what the farm is, what the crisis looks like, and which interventions can survive contact with daily work.
What the framework leaves unresolved
The material presents a rich participatory architecture, but it does not answer every operational question. The figures describe the game mechanics and the intended discussion points; they do not provide outcome data on whether the intervention changes behavior, improves adherence to control measures, or reduces abortion outbreaks over time. The remaining challenge is to determine how well this kind of shared scenario planning translates into measurable infection control, especially in farms with different production models and regulatory pressures.
For now, the value of ZOOJEU lies in how directly it confronts the mismatch between policy and practice. It brings farmers, clinicians, and public health actors into the same frame, then asks them to work through the kind of outbreak that can expose every weak seam in the system.