Mapping disease risk in human-wildlife ‘hotspots’

A new study reveals how infectious diseases spread among wildlife populations in areas where humans and wildlife live in close proximity. In this study, we identified that animals, especially wild monkeys that live in large groups along human settlements, can act as ‘super-spreaders’.

It turns out that monkeys, which have the most interactions with humans, are responsible for the biggest outbreaks. This is because different groups and subgroups of monkeys can congregate around these places of close contact between monkeys and humans, usually food sources. In these hotspots of human-wildlife coexistence, monkeys interact closely with monkeys they don’t regularly interact with, leading to larger outbreaks.

As the world population increases, human habitation Risks from both are increasing as wildlife’s natural habitats are increasingly being eroded. zoonotic disease Wildlife-to-human ‘spillovers’ and zoonotic diseases that ‘spillover’ from humans and cause outbreaks among wildlife.

It was published in the magazine scientific report Led by Dr. Krishna Balasubramaniam of Anglia Ruskin University (ARU), the study used epidemiological computer models to Infection It can be spread among monkeys living in urban and peri-urban areas of South and Southeast Asia. This is the first study to use simulations to compare the spread of disease through social behavior in animals and the tendency of animals to gather around and interact with humans.

A team of researchers, including academics from the University of California, Davis, monitored the behavior of rhesus, cercopithecus, and bonnet macaques in northern India, Malaysia, and southern India, respectively. In these locations, wild macaques often share space with humans, and interactions with humans often center around access to food.

Researchers have collected detailed behavioral data on interactions between humans and individual monkeys, as well as between monkeys within the same group with whom individuals have strong social ties. This information was collected from 10 separate groups of macaques at his three sites in India and Malaysia.

This behavioral data is input into a mathematical susceptibility-infection-recovery (SIR) epidemiological model to simulate the impact of various contagious human disease outbreaks, such as influenza virus, coronavirus, and measles virus. I was.Computer simulations were run a total of 100,000 times on 10 groups and various human diseases to identify these vulnerabilities. Macaque Populations were evaluated for the incidence of anthropogenic disease.

According to research, outbreak positively predicted by centrality within the group of initially infected macaques. If that individual is better connected within a social network, it will lead to a larger outbreak.

A second key finding is that the centrality of the initially infected individual is based both on their gathering with other monkeys around humans and their interaction with humans, and that centrality is more important than centrality within a population. It plays a big role in predicting the scale of outbreaks.

This is because macaques can congregate around human-prepared food along with other macaques. The study reveals that these situations appear to create additional pathways for disease transmission, resulting in larger outbreaks.

The researchers believe the study will help identify individual monkeys that are the most social, tend to cluster around and interact with humans the most. Targeting could potentially protect both macaque populations and the humans in the areas where they live. Proximity.

Dr Krishna Balasubramaniam, Lecturer in Conservation and Animal Behavior at Anglia Ruskin University (ARU) said: wildlife population in cities and peri-urban areas. Population expansion has increased human-wildlife contact, and these human-wildlife contact points are widely recognized as ‘hotspots’ for disease transmission across different species.

“Our study focused on the potential impact of spreading human-borne disease on wild macaque populations. It is highly vulnerable to the same diseases, indeed previous studies by other researchers have established that macaques can infect macaques, here specifically respiratory pathogens via macaque populations. showed how it spreads, and in particular how its behavior influences such spread.

“Through fieldwork and modeling, our study identified which individuals were most likely to act as ‘super-spreaders’ of the disease, leading to larger outbreaks. Whether it was central affected the size of the outbreak, but interestingly, predictors of whether stronger macaques would provoke larger outbreaks around humans along with other subgroups of macaques. tended to gather at

“Human-provided food sources can act as ‘honeypots’ and come into very close contact with otherwise low-contact individuals, such as monkeys from other families and subgroups. .

“These individuals, who are not only ‘superspreaders’ within the species, but also have the most human contact, are at the highest risk of interspecies transmission.” disease transmission Events from humans to wildlife or vice versa. These will be the most effective targets for disease control strategies such as vaccination and antimicrobial therapy. ”