ArticleProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America2014
Declines in large wildlife increase landscape-level prevalence of rodent-borne disease in Africa.
Article in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2014. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 46 papers.
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The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
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Who cites it
46 citing papers in PubMed, 148 citations in OpenAlex.
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- Effects of Season, Habitat, and Host Characteristics on Ectoparasites of Wild Rodents in a Mosaic Rural Landscape.Animals : an open access journal from MDPI · 2024Article
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- Zoonoses in a changing world.Bioscience · 2023Article
- Mutilation of the tree of life via mass extinction of animal genera.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2023Article
- Urban rats as carriers of invasive Salmonella Typhimurium sequence type 313, Kisangani, Democratic Republic of Congo.PLoS neglected tropical diseases · 2022Article
- Wildlife susceptibility to infectious diseases at global scales.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2022Article
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- Averting wildlife-borne infectious disease epidemics requires a focus on socio-ecological drivers and a redesign of the global food system.EClinicalMedicine · 2022Review
- Eco-epidemiological screening of multi-host wild rodent communities in the UK reveals pathogen strains of zoonotic interest.International journal for parasitology. Parasites and wildlife · 2022Article
- An eco-epidemiological modeling approach to investigate dilution effect in two different tick-borne pathosystems.Ecological applications : a publication of the Ecological Society of America · 2022Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
10 authors at 8 institutions in 1 country.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Populations of large wildlife are declining on local and global scales. The impacts of this pulse of size-selective defaunation include cascading changes to smaller animals, particularly rodents, and alteration of many ecosystem processes and services, potentially involving changes to prevalence and transmission of zoonotic disease. Understanding linkages between biodiversity loss and zoonotic disease is important for both public health and nature conservation programs, and has been a source of much recent scientific debate. In the case of rodent-borne zoonoses, there is strong conceptual support, but limited empirical evidence, for the hypothesis that defaunation, the loss of large wildlife, increases zoonotic disease risk by directly or indirectly releasing controls on rodent density. We tested this hypothesis by experimentally excluding large wildlife from a savanna ecosystem in East Africa, and examining changes in prevalence and abundance of Bartonella spp. infection in rodents and their flea vectors. We found no effect of wildlife removal on per capita prevalence of Bartonella infection in either rodents or fleas. However, because rodent and, consequently, flea abundance doubled following experimental defaunation, the density of infected hosts and infected fleas was roughly twofold higher in sites where large wildlife was absent. Thus, defaunation represents an elevated risk in Bartonella transmission to humans (bartonellosis). Our results (i) provide experimental evidence of large wildlife defaunation increasing landscape-level disease prevalence, (ii) highlight the importance of susceptible host regulation pathways and host/vector density responses in biodiversity-disease relationships, and (iii) suggest that rodent-borne disease responses to large wildlife loss may represent an important context where this relationship is largely negative.
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Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.