Dataset Information

Global biogeography of human infectious diseases.

ABSTRACT: The distributions of most infectious agents causing disease in humans are poorly resolved or unknown. However, poorly known and unknown agents contribute to the global burden of disease and will underlie many future disease risks. Existing patterns of infectious disease co-occurrence could thus play a critical role in resolving or anticipating current and future disease threats. We analyzed the global occurrence patterns of 187 human infectious diseases across 225 countries and seven epidemiological classes (human-specific, zoonotic, vector-borne, non-vector-borne, bacterial, viral, and parasitic) to show that human infectious diseases exhibit distinct spatial grouping patterns at a global scale. We demonstrate, using outbreaks of Ebola virus as a test case, that this spatial structuring provides an untapped source of prior information that could be used to tighten the focus of a range of health-related research and management activities at early stages or in data-poor settings, including disease surveillance, outbreak responses, or optimizing pathogen discovery. In examining the correlates of these spatial patterns, among a range of geographic, epidemiological, environmental, and social factors, mammalian biodiversity was the strongest predictor of infectious disease co-occurrence overall and for six of the seven disease classes examined, giving rise to a striking congruence between global pathogeographic and "Wallacean" zoogeographic patterns. This clear biogeographic signal suggests that infectious disease assemblages remain fundamentally constrained in their distributions by ecological barriers to dispersal or establishment, despite the homogenizing forces of globalization. Pathogeography thus provides an overarching context in which other factors promoting infectious disease emergence and spread are set.

SUBMITTER: Murray KA

PROVIDER: S-EPMC4611664 | biostudies-literature | 2015 Oct

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature

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Global biogeography of human infectious diseases.

Murray Kris A KA Preston Nicholas N Allen Toph T Zambrana-Torrelio Carlos C Hosseini Parviez R PR Daszak Peter P

Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America 20150928 41

The distributions of most infectious agents causing disease in humans are poorly resolved or unknown. However, poorly known and unknown agents contribute to the global burden of disease and will underlie many future disease risks. Existing patterns of infectious disease co-occurrence could thus play a critical role in resolving or anticipating current and future disease threats. We analyzed the global occurrence patterns of 187 human infectious diseases across 225 countries and seven epidemiolog ...[more]

PMID: 26417098

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Project description:Biogeography is an implicit and fundamental component of almost every dimension of modern biology, from natural selection and speciation to invasive species and biodiversity management. However, biogeography has rarely been integrated into human or veterinary medicine nor routinely leveraged for global health management. Here we review the theory and application of biogeography to the research and management of human infectious diseases, an integration we refer to as 'pathogeography'. Pathogeography represents a promising framework for understanding and decomposing the spatial distributions, diversity patterns and emergence risks of human infectious diseases into interpretable components of dynamic socio-ecological systems. Analytical tools from biogeography are already helping to improve our understanding of individual infectious disease distributions and the processes that shape them in space and time. At higher levels of organization, biogeographical studies of diseases are rarer but increasing, improving our ability to describe and explain patterns that emerge at the level of disease communities (e.g. co-occurrence, diversity patterns, biogeographic regionalisation). Even in a highly globalized world most human infectious diseases remain constrained in their geographic distributions by ecological barriers to the dispersal or establishment of their causal pathogens, reservoir hosts and/or vectors. These same processes underpin the spatial arrangement of other taxa, such as mammalian biodiversity, providing a strong empirical 'prior' with which to assess the potential distributions of infectious diseases when data on their occurrence is unavailable or limited. In the absence of quality data, generalized biogeographic patterns could provide the earliest (and in some cases the only) insights into the potential distributions of many poorly known or emerging, or as-yet-unknown, infectious disease risks. Encouraging more community ecologists and biogeographers to collaborate with health professionals (and vice versa) has the potential to improve our understanding of infectious disease systems and identify novel management strategies to improve local, global and planetary health.

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Dataset Information

Global biogeography of human infectious diseases.

Publications

Global biogeography of human infectious diseases.

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