EcoHealth Alliance, New York, NY 10001, USA.
Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A. 2013 Feb 26;110 Suppl 1(Suppl 1):3681-8. doi: 10.1073/pnas.1201243109. Epub 2012 Aug 30.
Emerging infectious diseases (EIDs) pose a significant threat to human health, economic stability, and biodiversity. Despite this, the mechanisms underlying disease emergence are still not fully understood, and control measures rely heavily on mitigating the impact of EIDs after they have emerged. Here, we highlight the emergence of a zoonotic Henipavirus, Nipah virus, to demonstrate the interdisciplinary and macroecological approaches necessary to understand EID emergence. Previous work suggests that Nipah virus emerged due to the interaction of the wildlife reservoir (Pteropus spp. fruit bats) with intensively managed livestock. The emergence of this and other henipaviruses involves interactions among a suite of anthropogenic environmental changes, socioeconomic factors, and changes in demography that overlay and interact with the distribution of these pathogens in their wildlife reservoirs. Here, we demonstrate how ecological niche modeling may be used to investigate the potential role of a changing climate on the future risk for Henipavirus emergence. We show that the distribution of Henipavirus reservoirs, and therefore henipaviruses, will likely change under climate change scenarios, a fundamental precondition for disease emergence in humans. We assess the variation among climate models to estimate where Henipavirus host distribution is most likely to expand, contract, or remain stable, presenting new risks for human health. We conclude that there is substantial potential to use this modeling framework to explore the distribution of wildlife hosts under a changing climate. These approaches may directly inform current and future management and surveillance strategies aiming to improve pathogen detection and, ultimately, reduce emergence risk.
新发传染病（EIDs）对人类健康、经济稳定和生物多样性构成重大威胁。尽管如此，疾病暴发的机制仍未完全被理解，控制措施主要依赖于在疾病暴发后减轻其影响。在这里，我们以人畜共患亨尼帕病毒（Nipah virus）的出现为例，说明理解 EID 暴发所必需的跨学科和宏观生态方法。先前的工作表明，尼帕病毒的出现是由于野生动物宿主（果蝠属的各种果蝠）与集约化管理的牲畜相互作用的结果。这种和其他亨尼帕病毒的出现涉及一系列人为环境变化、社会经济因素以及人口统计学变化的相互作用，这些变化叠加并相互作用于这些病原体在其野生动物宿主中的分布。在这里，我们展示了生态位模型如何用于研究气候变化对亨尼帕病毒未来暴发风险的潜在作用。我们表明，在气候变化情景下，亨尼帕病毒的宿主分布，因此也包括亨尼帕病毒，可能会发生变化，这是人类疾病暴发的基本前提。我们评估了气候模型之间的差异，以估计亨尼帕病毒宿主分布最有可能扩张、收缩或保持稳定的地方，为人类健康带来新的风险。我们得出结论，有很大的潜力可以利用这种建模框架来探索气候变化下野生动物宿主的分布。这些方法可以直接为当前和未来的管理和监测策略提供信息，旨在提高病原体检测，并最终降低暴发风险。
