Preprints
Filtering by Subject: Parasitic Diseases
Illegal cattle trade brings New World Screwworm to wildlife and continues to destroy protected areas in Mesoamerica
Published: 2025-07-30
Subjects: Agriculture, Animal Diseases, Animal Sciences, Biodiversity, Entomology, Life Sciences, Other Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Parasitic Diseases, Parasitology, Public Health, Veterinary Preventive Medicine, Epidemiology, and Public Health
The New World Screwworm (Cochliomyia hominivorax; “screwworm”) is a parasitic fly historically endemic to the Americas. Females lay eggs in open wounds of warm-blooded animals, including humans. The emerging larvae feed on the host’s living tissue, often resulting in severe damage and potentially death. After five decades of coordinated efforts, the screwworm was successfully eradicated from [...]
A minimum data standard for wildlife disease research and surveillance
Published: 2024-05-19
Subjects: Animal Diseases, Biodiversity, Bioinformatics, Diseases, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Environmental Microbiology and Microbial Ecology Life Sciences, Life Sciences, Microbiology, Parasitic Diseases, Veterinary Infectious Diseases, Veterinary Medicine, Virology, Virus Diseases
Rapid and comprehensive data sharing is vital to the transparency and actionability of wildlife infectious disease research and surveillance. Unfortunately, most best practices for publicly sharing these data are focused on pathogen determination and genetic sequence data. Other facets of wildlife disease data – particularly negative results – are often withheld or, at best, summarized in a [...]
Solving the “small outbreak problem” in climate epidemiology
Published: 2024-01-04
Subjects: Climate, Diseases, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Entomology, Environmental Public Health, Epidemiology, Life Sciences, Microbiology, Parasitic Diseases, Public Health, Virus Diseases
Climate change can cause outbreaks of infectious diseases in unfamiliar locations — but how do we know which unusual outbreaks are the result of climate change? Scientists often hesitate to guess, leaving the task to journalists or the public. All of these audiences would benefit from a clear and consistent framework for thinking about causality, especially in situations where outbreaks are too [...]
A call to action: Understanding land use-induced zoonotic spillover to protect environmental, animal, and human health
Published: 2020-09-26
Subjects: Animal Diseases, Biodiversity, Biology, Diseases, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Immunity, Immunology and Infectious Disease, Immunology of Infectious Disease, Life Sciences, Medicine and Health Sciences, Parasitic Diseases, Public Health, Systems Biology, Veterinary Medicine
The rapid, global spread and human health impacts of SARS-CoV-2, the agent of COVID-19 disease, demonstrates humanity’s vulnerability to zoonotic disease pandemics. Although anthropogenic land use change is known to be the major driver of zoonotic pathogen spillover from wildlife to human populations, the scientific underpinnings of land use-induced zoonotic spillover have rarely been [...]