Global hotspots and correlates of emerging zoonotic diseases

Abstract

Zoonoses originating from wildlife represent a significant threat to global health, security and economic growth, and combatting their emergence is a public health priority. However, our understanding of the mechanisms underlying their emergence remains rudimentary. Here we update a global database of emerging infectious disease (EID) events, create a novel measure of reporting effort, and fit boosted regression tree models to analyze the demographic, environmental and biological correlates of their occurrence. After accounting for reporting effort, we show that zoonotic EID risk is elevated in forested tropical regions experiencing land-use changes and where wildlife biodiversity (mammal species richness) is high. We present a new global hotspot map of spatial variation in our zoonotic EID risk index, and partial dependence plots illustrating relationships between events and predictors. Our results may help to improve surveillance and long-term EID monitoring programs, and design field experiments to test underlying mechanisms of zoonotic disease emergence.

An Ecological Framework for Modeling the Geography of Disease Transmission

“…The use of outbreak data to model disease distributions raises methodological issues. Disease data are generally aggregated at coarse politicoadministrative levels (e.g., province, country), losing crucial information on the local natural history of the disease [1,33]. Additionally, the geographic site of infection and the associated uncertainty are generally not reported and may instead refer to the health-care facility where it is diagnosed [1], potentially misleading the identification of ecological conditions favoring disease occurrence.…”

“…Approximately 60% of emerging human diseases are caused by pathogenic parasites of animal origin (zoonoses), particularly wildlife [6]. As human activities intensify, contact with wildlife and exposure to novel parasites increase, potentially driving zoonotic disease emergence [1,7]. Given the threat that EIDs pose to human populations, understanding the underlying drivers of parasite geographic distribution and their spillover to humans is particularly relevant for epidemiologists, public-health practitioners, and policy makers [9].Ecological niche modeling (ENM) has proven useful to forecast the distribution of a vast number of organisms [10-13] and is increasingly employed to predict parasite distributions locally and globally [14][15][16][17].…”

Call for independent monitoring of disease outbreak preparedness

“…This may be due to a variety of factors, including low veterinary and human public health standards, climate change, migration, growing incomes and meat consumption in emerging economies, encroachment of people and their livestock on wildlife habitats, and animal-human proximity in poor households and in many cities in low income countries 10. The emergence and spread of antimicrobial resistance is a related threat that could have similar effects to those of a severe influenza pandemic or climate change 7.…”

“…Communications about zoonotic diseases can be harmful when health officials (or the media) mislead the public about the source of the risk and also influence behaviour 10. Research on risk perception, behavioural reactions, and media incentives can improve containment strategies.…”

Multivariate relationships between epidemiologic risk factors and zoonotic infections among military personnel in the country of Georgia: A non‐linear canonical correlation analysis

“…Zoonotic diseases represent a significant threat to human and animal health (Allen et al, ), and their prevention, detection and control constitute a public health priority in endemic regions. One of these regions is the South Caucasus.…”