Abstract
Emerging infectious diseases in humans are frequently caused by pathogens originating from animal hosts, and zoonotic disease outbreaks present a major challenge to global health. To investigate drivers of virus spillover, we evaluated the number of viruses mammalian species have shared with humans. We discovered that the number of zoonotic viruses detected in mammalian species scales positively with global species abundance, suggesting that virus transmission risk has been highest from animal species that have increased in abundance and even expanded their range by adapting to human-dominated landscapes. Domesticated species, primates and bats were identified as having more zoonotic viruses than other species. Among threatened wildlife species, those with population reductions owing to exploitation and loss of habitat shared more viruses with humans. Exploitation of wildlife through hunting and trade facilitates close contact between wildlife and humans, and our findings provide further evidence that exploitation, as well as anthropogenic activities that have caused losses in wildlife habitat quality, have increased opportunities for animal–human interactions and facilitated zoonotic disease transmission. Our study provides new evidence for assessing spillover risk from mammalian species and highlights convergent processes whereby the causes of wildlife population declines have facilitated the transmission of animal viruses to humans.
Highlights
Infectious diseases that originate from animals and infect people comprise the majority of recurrent and emerging infectious disease threats and are widely considered to be one of the greatest challenges facing public health [1,2,3]
Global-scale analysis across the breadth of all zoonotic viruses reveals structured variation among mammalian species that have been implicated as a potential source of virus spillover to humans, with predictable patterns in zoonotic virus richness related to species domestication and recent trends in wildlife populations
We found that three mammalian orders have together been implicated as hosts for the majority (75.8%) of zoonotic viruses described to date, and these orders represent 72.7% of all terrestrial mammal species
Summary
Infectious diseases that originate from animals and infect people comprise the majority of recurrent and emerging infectious disease threats and are widely considered to be one of the greatest challenges facing public health [1,2,3]. We combine data on all zoonotic viruses detected in terrestrial mammalian species with IUCN metrics on trends in species abundance and threats identified in species declines in order to relate broad-scale patterns in species abundance to spillover risk. BThe incident rate ratio (IRR) reflects the relative influence on the expected number of zoonotic viruses in a given species for a given category compared to the reference category specified This model incorporates a logit model to predict non-detections in host species designated with ‘data deficient/unknown population trend’. All data used to evaluate the relationship between species status, criteria for listing, species order, domestication status, the number of PubMed publications and zoonotic virus richness recognized to the date of the study in a mammalian species are presented in the electronic supplementary material, Data File S2
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