Ecology of zoonoses: natural and unnatural histories
By W. Karesh, A. Dobson, James O. Lloyd-Smith, J. Lubroth, M. Dixon, M. Bennett, S. Aldrich, Todd Harrington, Pierre Formenty, Elizabeth Loh and 3 more. The Lancet, 2012
788 citations recorded by the source corpus.
Summary More than 60% of human infectious diseases are caused by pathogens shared with wild or domestic animals. Zoonotic disease organisms include those that are endemic in human populations or enzootic in animal populations with frequent cross-species transmission to people. Some of these diseases have only emerged recently. Together, these organisms are responsible for a substantial burden of disease, with endemic and enzootic zoonoses causing about a billion cases of illness in people and millions of deaths every year. Emerging zoonoses are a growing threat to global health and have caused hundreds of billions of US dollars of economic damage in the past 20 years. We aimed to review how zoonotic diseases result from natural pathogen ecology, and how other circumstances, such as animal production, extraction of natural resources, and antimicrobial application change the dynamics of disease exposure to human beings. In view of present anthropogenic trends, a more effective approach to zoonotic disease prevention and control will require a broad view of medicine that emphasises evidence-based decision making and integrates ecological and evolutionary principles of animal, human, and environmental factors. This broad view is essential for the successful development of policies and practices that reduce probability of future zoonotic emergence, targeted surveillance and strategic prevention, and engagement of partners outside the medical community to help improve health outcomes and reduce disease threats.
Subfields: Agronomy and Crop Science, Genetics, Public Health, Environmental and Occupational Health
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/78c310e37e0884b779c13279971afdd31a131af4
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Citations in the corpus
- Urbanization and Disease Emergence: Dynamics at the Wildlife–Livestock–Human Interface (2017, background): “Of these emerging zoonoses, at least 70% have a wildlife origin, with cross-species spread and onward transmission representing a natural response to the evolutionary pressures of pathogen ecology [3,4].”
- Rodent reservoirs of future zoonotic diseases (2015, background): “Until now, investigations of disease outbreaks have mostly been reactive, with surveillance efforts targeting a broad host range (5), but because human activities precipitating these events continue to accelerate (4, 6), a more proactive approach is necessary (7, 8).”