Abstract
Plague remains a threat to public health and is considered as a re-emerging infectious disease today. Rodents play an important role as major hosts in plague persistence and driving plague outbreaks in natural foci; however, few studies have tested the association between host diversity in ecosystems and human plague risk. Here we use zero-inflated generalized additive models to examine the association of species richness with human plague presence (where plague outbreaks could occur) and intensity (the average number of annual human cases when they occurred) in China during the Third Pandemic. We also account for transportation network density, annual precipitation levels and human population size. We found rodent species richness, particularly of rodent plague hosts, is positively associated with the presence of human plague. Further investigation shows that species richness of both wild and commensal rodent plague hosts are positively correlated with the presence, but only the latter correlated with the intensity. Our results indicated a positive relationship between rodent diversity and human plague, which may provide suggestions for the plague surveillance system.
Highlights
Plague remains a threat to public health and is considered as a re-emerging infectious disease today
Further investigation shows that species richness of both wild and commensal rodent plague hosts are positively correlated with the presence, but only the latter correlated with the intensity
We explored different subsets of vertebrate species richness; in addition to considering the local species richness of all 1797 terrestrial vertebrate species in the biodiversity dataset in model (i), we considered models that only looked at the subset of 563 mammal species (ii), 191 rodent species (iii), 88 species known to be involved in plague ecosystems and transmission in China (iv), 54 species of rodent plague hosts (v), and of those in only the subset that are wild rodent plague hosts (vi), and only the subset that are commensal rodent plague hosts (vii)
Summary
Plague remains a threat to public health and is considered as a re-emerging infectious disease today. We use zero-inflated generalized additive models to examine the association of species richness with human plague presence (where plague outbreaks could occur) and intensity (the average number of annual human cases when they occurred) in China during the Third Pandemic. Abiotic and anthropogenic factors, such as annual precipitation levels, local human population size and transportation connectivity (main transportation network density) are known to affect through various mechanisms where local plague outbreaks occur, the intensity of those outbreaks and further dissemination of the disease [8,9,12]. Transportation routes, a factor partially correlated to human population density, can reshape the distribution of plague by accelerating the spread of infected animals and humans to a larger area, affecting both the presence and the intensity of outbreaks [8,16]. Previous studies have demonstrated that transportation accounted for the introduction and subsequent spread of plague in Europe [17,18], as well as the dispersion of plague in China [8]
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