Abstract
Ebola and Marburg viruses are maintained in unknown reservoir species; spillover into human populations results in occasional human cases or epidemics. We attempted to narrow the list of possibilities regarding the identity of those reservoir species. We made a series of explicit assumptions about the reservoir: it is a mammal; it supports persistent, largely asymptomatic filovirus infections; its range subsumes that of its associated filovirus; it has coevolved with the virus; it is of small body size; and it is not a species that is commensal with humans. Under these assumptions, we developed priority lists of mammal clades that coincide distributionally with filovirus outbreak distributions and compared these lists with those mammal taxa that have been tested for filovirus infection in previous epidemiologic studies. Studying the remainder of these taxa may be a fruitful avenue for pursuing the identity of natural reservoirs of filoviruses.
Highlights
Ebola and Marburg viruses are maintained in unknown reservoir species; spillover into human populations results in occasional human cases or epidemics
The virus family Filoviridae has been known since 1967, when Marburg virus caused an outbreak of hemorrhagic disease associated with exposure to primates imported into Germany; Marburg and Ebola viruses were subsequently the cause of isolated cases or epidemics of hemorrhagic fever in humans or nonhuman primates across Africa [1,2,3] and in parts of southeast Asia [4], and in outbreaks among nonhuman primates in North America and Europe that resulted from importation of infected primates [5]
Because the phylogenetic distance between Marburg virus and the Ebola viruses is much greater than the distance among the Ebola viruses, we provide separate reservoir candidate lists for Marburg virus, to allow for the possibility that the reservoir for Marburg virus falls within a separate reservoir taxon
Summary
Ebola and Marburg viruses are maintained in unknown reservoir species; spillover into human populations results in occasional human cases or epidemics. We made a series of explicit assumptions about the reservoir: it is a mammal; it supports persistent, largely asymptomatic filovirus infections; its range subsumes that of its associated filovirus; it has coevolved with the virus; it is of small body size; and it is not a species that is commensal with humans Under these assumptions, we developed priority lists of mammal clades that coincide distributionally with filovirus outbreak distributions and compared these lists with those mammal taxa that have been tested for filovirus infection in previous epidemiologic studies. We use a series of biologic inferences regarding host-parasite interactions and make explicit assumptions to arrive at a much-reduced list of potential reservoir taxa This approach aims to identify taxa that, under explicit assumptions, have a higher probability of constituting the reservoirs of these viruses. Suggests that mammals may constitute an excellent first candidate for detailed consideration: 1) results of efforts to infect plants and arthropods with filoviruses have been negative
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