ArticleNature ecology & evolution2022
Urban-adapted mammal species have more known pathogens.
Article in Nature ecology & evolution, 2022. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 30 papers, 1 of them a synthesis that pooled it.
What it found
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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.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
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Who cites it
30 citing papers in PubMed, 1 synthesis or guideline pooled it, 55 citations in OpenAlex.
- Diversity and transmission and zoonotic potential of microbes in true insectivores.Nature communications · 2025Pooled it
- Article
- Revisiting Animal Reservoirs of Hantavirus and Other Zoonotic Viruses Associated with Cruise Travel: Impact and Prevention.Animals : an open access journal from MDPI · 2026Review
- A global-scale assessment of zoonotic virus diversity and spillover potential in urban-adapted mammal species.Nature microbiology · 2026Article
- Interepidemic Rift Valley fever in East Africa: the recent risk landscape and projected impacts of global change.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2026Article
- Surveillance of Zoonotic Pathogens in Small Mammals Across Forests With Different Levels of Anthropization in Eastern France.Transboundary and emerging diseases · 2026Article
- Viral epidemic potential is not uniformly distributed across the bat phylogeny.Communications biology · 2025Article
- Pathogens and planetary change.Nature reviews. Biodiversity · 2025Article
- Towards a 'people and nature' paradigm for biodiversity and infectious disease.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2025Review
- Small mammals and associated infections in China: a systematic review and spatial modelling analysis.The Lancet regional health. Western Pacific · 2025Article
- Potentially zoonotic pathogens and parasites in opportunistically sourced urban brown rats (Euro surveillance : bulletin Europeen sur les maladies transmissibles = European communicable disease bulletin · 2024Article
- Ecological and evolutionary characteristics of anthropogenic roosting ability in bats of the world.iScience · 2024Article
- Identifying life-history patterns along the fast-slow continuum of mammalian viral carriers.Royal Society open science · 2024Article
- Current and future environmental suitability for bats hosting potential zoonotic pathogens in rural Kenya.Ecology and evolution · 2024Article
- The evolutionary drivers and correlates of viral host jumps.Nature ecology & evolution · 2024Article
- Association between anthropization and rodent reservoirs of zoonotic pathogens in Northwestern Mexico.PloS one · 2024Article
- Uncovering the Holocene roots of contemporary disease-scapes: bringing archaeology into One Health.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2023Review
- The ecology of viruses in urban rodents with a focus on SARS-CoV-2.Emerging microbes & infections · 2023Article
- Range area and the fast-slow continuum of life history traits predict pathogen richness in wild mammals.Scientific reports · 2023Article
- Epidemiological connectivity between humans and animals across an urban landscape.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2023Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
8 authors at 7 institutions in 3 countries.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
The world is rapidly urbanizing, inviting mounting concern that urban environments will experience increased zoonotic disease risk. Urban animals could have more frequent contact with humans, therefore transmitting more zoonotic parasites; however, this relationship is complicated by sampling bias and phenotypic confounders. Here we test whether urban mammal species host more zoonotic parasites, investigating the underlying drivers alongside a suite of phenotypic, taxonomic and geographic predictors. We found that urban-adapted mammals have more documented parasites and more zoonotic parasites: despite comprising only 6% of investigated species, urban mammals provided 39% of known host-parasite combinations. However, contrary to predictions, much of the observed effect was attributable to parasite discovery and research effort rather than to urban adaptation status, and urban-adapted species in fact hosted fewer zoonotic parasites than expected on the basis of their total parasite richness. We conclude that extended historical contact with humans has had a limited impact on zoonotic parasite richness in urban-adapted mammals; instead, their greater observed zoonotic richness probably reflects sampling bias arising from proximity to humans, supporting a near-universal conflation between zoonotic risk, research effort and synanthropy. These findings underscore the need to resolve the mechanisms linking anthropogenic change, sampling bias and observed wildlife disease dynamics.
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Registered trials
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.