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The accelerated infectious disease risk in the Anthropocene: more outbreaks and wider global spread

View ORCID ProfileSerge Morand, View ORCID ProfileBruno A. Walther
doi: https://doi.org/10.1101/2020.04.20.049866
Serge Morand
1CIRAD, UMR ASTRE, F-34398, Montpellier, France
2CNRS – Institut des Sciences de l’Evolution de Montpellier, Université de Montpellier, France
3Faculty of Veterinary Technology, Kasetsart University, Bangkok, Thailand
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Bruno A. Walther
4Department of Biological Sciences, National Sun Yat-sen University, Gushan District, Kaohsiung City, 804, Taiwan
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  • For correspondence: bawalther2009@gmail.com
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Abstract

The greatly accelerated economic growth during the Anthropocene has resulted in astonishing improvements in many aspects of human well-being, but has also caused the acceleration of risks, such as the interlinked biodiversity and climate crisis. Here, we report on another risk: the accelerated infectious disease risk associated with the number and geographic spread of human infectious disease outbreaks. Using the most complete, reliable, and up-to-date database on human infectious disease outbreaks (GIDEON), we show that the number of disease outbreaks, the number of diseases involved in these outbreaks, and the number of countries affected have increased during the entire Anthropocene. Furthermore, the spatial distribution of these outbreaks is becoming more globalized in the sense that the overall modularity of the disease networks across the globe has decreased, meaning disease outbreaks have become increasingly pandemic in their nature. This decrease in modularity is correlated with the increase in air traffic. We finally show that those countries and regions which are most central within these disease networks tend to be countries with higher GDPs. Therefore, one cost of increased global mobility and greater economic growth is the increased risk of disease outbreaks and their faster and wider spread. We briefly discuss three different scenarios which decision-makers might follow in light of our results.

Competing Interest Statement

The authors have declared no competing interest.

Copyright 
The copyright holder for this preprint is the author/funder, who has granted bioRxiv a license to display the preprint in perpetuity. It is made available under a CC-BY-NC-ND 4.0 International license.
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Posted April 20, 2020.
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The accelerated infectious disease risk in the Anthropocene: more outbreaks and wider global spread
Serge Morand, Bruno A. Walther
bioRxiv 2020.04.20.049866; doi: https://doi.org/10.1101/2020.04.20.049866
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The accelerated infectious disease risk in the Anthropocene: more outbreaks and wider global spread
Serge Morand, Bruno A. Walther
bioRxiv 2020.04.20.049866; doi: https://doi.org/10.1101/2020.04.20.049866

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