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Urban-adapted mammal species have more known pathogens

View ORCID ProfileGregory F Albery, Colin J. Carlson, Lily E Cohen, Evan A. Eskew, Rory Gibb, Sadie J. Ryan, Amy R Sweeny, Daniel J Becker
doi: https://doi.org/10.1101/2021.01.02.425084
Gregory F Albery
1Department of Biology, Georgetown University, Washington D.C., 20007
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  • For correspondence: gfalbery@gmail.com
Colin J. Carlson
2Center for Global Health Science and Security, Georgetown University Medical Center, Washington, D.C., 20007
3Department of Microbiology and Immunology, Georgetown University Medical Center, Washington, D.C., 20007
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Lily E Cohen
4Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, New York, NY, 10029
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Evan A. Eskew
5Department of Biology, Pacific Lutheran University, Tacoma, WA, 98447
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Rory Gibb
6Centre for Mathematical Modelling of Infectious Diseases, London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, London, UK
7Centre on Climate Change and Planetary Health, London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, London, UK
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Sadie J. Ryan
8Quantitative Disease Ecology and Conservation (QDEC) Lab Group, Department of Geography, University of Florida, Gainesville, FL, 32610 USA
9Emerging Pathogens Institute, University of Florida, Gainesville, FL, 32610 USA
10School of Life Sciences, University of KwaZulu-Natal, Durban, 4041, South Africa
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Amy R Sweeny
11University of Edinburgh, Ashworth Laboratories, Edinburgh EH9
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Daniel J Becker
12Department of Biology, University of Oklahoma, Norman, OK, USA
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Abstract

Mammals that regularly inhabit urban environments may have more frequent contact with humans and therefore host more known zoonotic pathogens. Here, we test this prediction using a consolidated dataset of phenotypic traits, urban affiliate status, and pathogen diversity, across 3004 mammal species. We show that urban-adapted mammals have more documented pathogens — and more zoonoses — even when considering a correlated suite of phenotypic, taxonomic, and geographic predictors. However, contrary to predictions, path analysis revealed that urban-adapted species do not host more zoonoses than expected given their total observed pathogen richness. We conclude that extended historical contact with humans has had a limited impact on the number of observed zoonoses in urban-adapted mammals. Instead, their greater observed zoonotic richness likely reflects either sampling bias due to greater cultural awareness and physical proximity to humans, or increased baseline pathogen diversity arising from the physiological and ecological consequences of urban living.

Authorship Statement GFA and DB conceived the study, and GFA analysed the data and wrote the manuscript. All other authors offered thoughts on the analysis and commented on the manuscript.

Data Accessibility Statement The code used here is available at https://github.com/gfalbery/UrbanOutputters. On acceptance, the data will be uploaded to the same repo, which will be archived on Zenodo.

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 January 04, 2021.
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Urban-adapted mammal species have more known pathogens
Gregory F Albery, Colin J. Carlson, Lily E Cohen, Evan A. Eskew, Rory Gibb, Sadie J. Ryan, Amy R Sweeny, Daniel J Becker
bioRxiv 2021.01.02.425084; doi: https://doi.org/10.1101/2021.01.02.425084
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Urban-adapted mammal species have more known pathogens
Gregory F Albery, Colin J. Carlson, Lily E Cohen, Evan A. Eskew, Rory Gibb, Sadie J. Ryan, Amy R Sweeny, Daniel J Becker
bioRxiv 2021.01.02.425084; doi: https://doi.org/10.1101/2021.01.02.425084

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