Editorial: Emerging Zoonoses: Eco-Epidemiology, Involved Mechanisms, and Public Health Implications.

Abstract

Zoonoses are currently considered as one of the most important threats for Public Health worldwide. Zoonoses can be defined as any disease or infection that is naturally transmissible from vertebrate or invertebrate animals to humans and vice-versa. Approximately, 75% of recently emerging infectious diseases affecting humans are diseases of animal origin; approximately, 60% of all human pathogens are zoonotic. All types of potential pathogenic agents, including viruses, parasites, bacteria, and fungi, can cause these zoonotic infections. From the wide range of potential vectors of zoonoses, arthropods are probably those of major significance due to their abundance, high plasticity, adaptability, and coevolution to different kinds of pathogens, high degrees of synanthropism in several groups, and difficulties to apply effective programs of population control. Although ticks, flies, sandflies, cockroaches, bugs, and fleas are excellent vectors capable of transmitting viruses, parasites, and bacteria, undoubtedly mosquitoes are the most important human disease vectors, while ticks are the most important vectors of pathogens in domestic production animals. Mosquito borne diseases like malaria, equine encephalitis, or West Nile are zoonoses with increasing incidence in the last years in tropical and temperate countries. All these zoonoses are thoroughly discussed in the Research Topic (1–5). Moreover, several researches focused on new tools to fight against Dengue vectors (6), studies about mosquito biodiversity (7), or novel modeling techniques based on climatic factors to predict vector’s incidence (8) can also be found in our compilation of research works related with zoonoses. Although it is well known that mosquitoes are the major vectors worldwide, probably ticks and tick-borne diseases are those that have aroused higher interest in epidemiologists and medical entomologists in recent years (9–12).