生態系が破壊されたコウモリはコロナウイルスに感染する頻度が高い(Bats in disrupted ecosystems are more frequently infected with coronaviruses)

2023-03-31 ミュンヘン大学(LMU)

<関連情報>

• https://www.lmu.de/en/newsroom/news-overview/news/bats-in-disrupted-ecosystems-are-more-frequently-infected-with-coronaviruses.html
• https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.add0688

人為的な妨害がコウモリのコロナウイルス有病率を高める Human disturbance increases coronavirus prevalence in bats

Vera M. Warmuth,Dirk Metzler and Veronica Zamora-Gutierrez
Science Advances  Published:31 Mar 2023
DOI:https://doi.org/10.1126/sciadv.add0688

Abstract

Human land modification is a known driver of animal-to-human transmission of infectious agents (zoonotic spillover). Infection prevalence in the reservoir is a key predictor of spillover, but landscape-level associations between the intensity of land modification and infection rates in wildlife remain largely untested. Bat-borne coronaviruses have caused three major disease outbreaks in humans: severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS), Middle East respiratory syndrome, and coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19). We statistically link high-resolution land modification data with bat coronavirus surveillance records and show that coronavirus prevalence significantly increases with the intensity of human impact across all climates and levels of background biodiversity. The most significant contributors to the overall human impact are agriculture, deforestation, and mining. Regions of high predicted bat coronavirus prevalence coincide with global disease hotspots, suggesting that infection prevalence in wildlife may be an important factor underlying links between human land modification and zoonotic disease emergence.