Humans Have Given Wild Animals Their Diseases Nearly 100 Times, Researchers Find
Published:24 Mar.2022 Source:Georgetown University Medical Center
In a study published March 22 in Ecology Letters, the authors describe nearly one hundred different cases where diseases have undergone "spillback" from humans back into wild animals, much like how SARS-CoV-2 has been able to spread in mink farms, zoo lions and tigers, and wild white-tailed deer. "There has understandably been an enormous amount of interest in human-to-wild animal pathogen transmission in light of the pandemic," says Gregory Albery, Ph.D., a postdoctoral fellow in the Department of Biology at Georgetown University and the study's senior author. "To help guide conversations and policy surrounding spillback of our pathogens in the future, we went digging through the literature to see how the process has manifested in the past."
In their new study, Albery and colleagues found that almost half of the incidents identified occurred in captive settings like zoos, where veterinarians keep a close eye on animals' health and are more likely to notice when a virus makes the jump. Additionally, more than half of cases they found were human-to-primate transmission, an unsurprising result both because pathogens find it easier to jump between closely-related hosts, and because wild populations of endangered great apes are so carefully monitored.