What it is
The authors consolidated 58,319 outbreak event records for 32 diseases and tested how 16 hypothesized social and environmental drivers shape where outbreaks occur, while accounting for detection and reporting biases. Outbreak risk was typically highest in mosaic landscapes where people and livestock live alongside forests and fragmented ecosystems, and these factors, together with long-term declines in precipitation, had strong shared effects across several vector-borne diseases such as dengue, Lyme disease and zoonotic arboviruses. Directly transmitted zoonoses such as Ebola and mpox shared few common drivers.
Why it matters
Human-driven ecosystem change and contact between people, wildlife and livestock can drive zoonotic and vector-borne disease emergence, but how much they shape outbreak risk had been poorly understood beyond a few well-studied systems. Testing many diseases and drivers together shows emergence to be multi-causal: the effects of most other pressures, including deforestation, climate warming and agricultural intensification, vary widely between diseases, which argues against any one-size-fits-all strategy for preventing epidemics.
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Filed underZoonotic diseases and public health, Climate Change and Health Impacts, Viral Infections and Vectors