Biological invasions facilitate zoonotic disease emergences

Abstract

Outbreaks of zoonotic diseases are accelerating at an unprecedented rate in the current era of globalization, with substantial impacts on the global economy, public health, and sustainability. Alien species invasions have been hypothesized to be important to zoonotic diseases by introducing both existing and novel pathogens to invaded ranges. However, few studies have evaluated the generality of alien species facilitating zoonoses across multiple host and parasite taxa worldwide. Here, we simultaneously quantify the role of 795 established alien hosts on the 10,473 zoonosis events across the globe since the 14th century. We observe an average of ~5.9 zoonoses per alien zoonotic host. After accounting for species-, disease-, and geographic-level sampling biases, spatial autocorrelation, and the lack of independence of zoonosis events, we find that the number of zoonosis events increase with the richness of alien zoonotic hosts, both across space and through time. We also detect positive associations between the number of zoonosis events per unit space and climate change, land-use change, biodiversity loss, human population density, and PubMed citations. These findings suggest that alien host introductions have likely contributed to zoonosis emergences throughout recent history and that minimizing future zoonotic host species introductions could have global health benefits.

Towards Better Governance on Biosafety and Biosecurity: China’s Advances and Perspectives in Medical Biotechnology Legislation

“…First, zoonotic diseases such as severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS), Ebola, Middle East respiratory syndrome (MERS), West Nile fever, and Rift Valley fever, as well as COVID-19, have been on the rise all over the world in the last two decades ( Bouskill and Smith, 2019 ; Zhang et al, 2022 ). These pandemics have clearly illustrated the significance of using new tools and methods to combat deadly diseases, as well as the potential biosafety concerns, both of which are critical in establishing a consensus among China’s regulators on a more proactive approach to medical biotechnology risks.…”

Global change drivers and the risk of infectious disease

“…Moreover, risk might only be high for certain types of pathogens or hosts, for wildlife but not human diseases, or for certain ecological conditions. As an example, the emergence of zoonotic diseases of humans tends to be driven more by interactions with particular mammalian and avian taxa than other vertebrate groups ( 20 ). Thus, understanding these context dependencies will further enhance the efficacious use of limited resources for disease control.…”

Status, mechanism, suitable distribution areas and protection countermeasure of invasive species in the karst areas of Southwest China

“…However, in recent years, these karst areas in Southwest China have suffered from serious biological invasion, which has decreased the biodiversity (Wang et al, 2004). Invasive species not only threaten the biodiversity of karst areas, but also may carry pathogens that threaten wildlife and human health (Zhang et al, 2022). Large numbers of invasive species were found in the karst areas of Guizhou, and malignant invasive species were found in more than 60% of survey sites (Yang et al, 2022).…”

“…Biological invasion has been recognized as one of the main factors driving biodiversity declines, economic losses, and zoonotic disease emergences in the world (Pysek et al, 2020;Diagne et al, 2021;Zhang et al, 2022). By 2018, 667 invasive species had been recorded in China (Xu, 2018).…”