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.

Cited by papers we hold 12

• Twenty Important Research Questions in Microbial Exposure and Social Equity · 2022
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• Averting wildlife-borne infectious disease epidemics requires a focus on socio-ecological drivers and a redesign of the global food system · 2022
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• Assessing the extent of land-use change around important bat-inhabited caves · 2021
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• Twenty-year trends in antimicrobial resistance from aquaculture and fisheries in Asia · 2021
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• A novel SARS-CoV-2 related coronavirus in bats from Cambodia · 2021
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• Impacts of biodiversity and biodiversity loss on zoonotic diseases · 2021
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• Global discovery of human-infective RNA viruses: A modelling analysis. · 2020
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• Emerging zoonotic diseases originating in mammals: a systematic review of effects of anthropogenic land‐use change · 2020
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• Possibility for reverse zoonotic transmission of SARS-CoV-2 to free-ranging wildlife: A case study of bats · 2020
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• Viral zoonotic risk is homogenous among taxonomic orders of mammalian and avian reservoir hosts · 2020
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• A Review of Antimicrobial Resistance in Poultry Farming within Low-Resource Settings · 2020
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• Improved inference of time-varying reproduction numbers during infectious disease outbreaks · 2019
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