Links Between Ecological Integrity, Emerging Infectious Diseases Originating from Wildlife, and Other Aspects of Human Health - An Overview of the Literature Article Swipe

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Tom Evans , Sarah H. Olson , James Watson , Kim Gruetzmacher , Mathieu Pruvot , Stacy D. Jupiter , Stephanie Wang , Tom Clements , Katie Jung · YOU? · · 2020 · Open Access · · DOI: https://doi.org/10.19121/2020.report.37426

As a result of the COVID-19 pandemic there is heightened public interest in the risk factors that lead to such events.The commercial wildlife trade and associated commercial wildlife markets for human consumption have been widely recognized as a major risk factor, and are the subject of a WCS policy brief focused specifically on that topic 1 .The current report looks at the broader issues of ecosystem integrity and ecosystem degradation.The degradation of ecosystems is often linked to the commercial wildlife trade but also results in various other processes that affect zoonotic disease transmission.The report contains an overview of the literature linking declines in the integrity of ecosystems to the risk of emerging infectious disease outbreaks that originate in wildlife, and also touches briefly on other impacts on human health.Four key findings are identified, as follows:1. Degradation has significantly altered ecological systems worldwide and continues to expand into new areas.2. The majority of emerging infectious disease2 threats are zoonotic, originate from wildlife, and often cause major social and economic impacts.3. Ecological degradation increases the overall risk of zoonotic disease outbreaks originating from wildlife.a.This relationship has been shown for multiple individual diseases, in regional and global multi-disease studies, and in theoretical models, although the proportion of cases of degradation that lead to substantially increased risk is not well understood.a.The increased risk results from multiple interacting pathways including increased human contact with pathogens and disruption in pathogen ecology.b.The key "ingredients" that accentuate the risk of an emerging infectious disease spillover event are activities (e.g., land conversion, creation of new habitat edges, wildlife trade and consumption, agricultural intensification) in or linked to areas of high biodiversity that elevate contact rates between humans and certain wildlife species.4. Degradation of ecosystems also has complex effects, feedback loops, and some notable negative impacts on many other aspects of human health, including: the prevalence of endemic zoonotic diseases, the prevalence of vector-borne and water-borne diseases; air quality; nutrition; mental health; and access to traditional medicines; as well as effects on human health through the impacts of climate change.These all in turn can contribute to local and transnational conflicts over natural resources and undermine local and international security.Hence, avoiding ecosystem degradation (by keeping ecosystems as intact as possible and avoiding the creation of high-risk interface zones and high-risk activities that increase humanwildlife contact), combined with broader One Health 3 approaches that address the full range of A separate WCS brief explores some of the issues relating to Indigenous Peoples and local communities in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic 4 .

Type

report

Language

en

Landing Page

https://doi.org/10.19121/2020.report.37426

PDF

https://library.wcs.org/DesktopModules/Bring2mind/DMX/API/Entries/Download?EntryId=37426&PortalId=0&DownloadMethod=attachment

OA Status

gold

Cited By

15

References

83

Related Works

10

OpenAlex ID

https://openalex.org/W3028690588

Raw OpenAlex JSON

OpenAlex ID

https://openalex.org/W3028690588

Canonical identifier for this work in OpenAlex

DOI

https://doi.org/10.19121/2020.report.37426

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Title

Links Between Ecological Integrity, Emerging Infectious Diseases Originating from Wildlife, and Other Aspects of Human Health - An Overview of the Literature

Work title

Type

report

OpenAlex work type

Language

en

Primary language

Publication year

2020

Year of publication

Publication date

2020-01-01

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Authors

Tom Evans, Sarah H. Olson, James Watson, Kim Gruetzmacher, Mathieu Pruvot, Stacy D. Jupiter, Stephanie Wang, Tom Clements, Katie Jung

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Landing page

https://doi.org/10.19121/2020.report.37426

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PDF URL

https://library.wcs.org/DesktopModules/Bring2mind/DMX/API/Entries/Download?EntryId=37426&PortalId=0&DownloadMethod=attachment

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Open access

Yes

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OA status

gold

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OA URL

https://library.wcs.org/DesktopModules/Bring2mind/DMX/API/Entries/Download?EntryId=37426&PortalId=0&DownloadMethod=attachment

Direct OA link when available

Concepts

Wildlife, Human health, Geography, Ecology, Environmental planning, Environmental resource management, Biology, Environmental health, Environmental science, Medicine

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Cited by

15

Total citation count in OpenAlex

Citations by year (recent)

2025: 2, 2023: 5, 2022: 5, 2021: 3

Per-year citation counts (last 5 years)

References (count)

83

Number of works referenced by this work

Related works (count)

10

Other works algorithmically related by OpenAlex

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