A burial team in Liberia awaits decontamination after performing"safe burials" for people who died of Ebola during the 2014-15 outbreak. Strains of the virus are harbored by bats and primates. A new study looks at how human activity affects the transmission of infectious diseases like Ebola.A burial team in Liberia awaits decontamination after performing"safe burials" for people who died of Ebola during the 2014-15 outbreak.
To get that broader view, Rohr and his colleagues built a dataset from nearly 1,000 studies across all continents except Antarctica. The team looked at 1,497 host-pathogen/parasite combinations . Across all those combos, the team analyzed several thousand instances of these global change drivers influencing infectious diseases outcomes for plants, animals and humans, such as increasing cases or the severity of a disease.
For all these species, biodiversity loss emerged as the biggest factor in increasing infectious disease risk, followed by the introduction of new species, climate change and, to a smaller extent, chemical pollution. Still, the lack of an effect of habitat loss is somewhat surprising, given scientists have drawn clear links between deforestation and increased risk of