The anthropogenic fingerprint on emerging infectious diseases

This paper consolidates 58,319 outbreak event records for 32 diseases and systematically test how 16 hypothesized social and environmental drivers impact outbreak geographies, while accounting for detection and reporting biases. The authors show that outbreak risks are typically highest in mosaic landscapes where people and livestock live alongside forests and fragmented ecosystems. These combined factors, along with long-term declines in precipitation, share strong impacts across several vector-borne diseases (for example, dengue, Lyme disease and zoonotic arboviruses).

By contrast, directly transmitted zoonoses (for example, Ebola and mpox) share few common drivers, and the impacts of most other anthropogenic pressures (for example, deforestation, climate warming and agricultural intensification) vary widely between diseases. Most consistently, the observed geography of outbreaks is shaped by healthcare access: reporting declines by a median of 32% (range across diseases: 1.2–96.7%) for each additional hour’s travel time from a health facility. The findings underscore that infectious disease spillover and emergence are multi-causal, and that no one-size-fits-all strategy can prevent epidemics and pandemics. Ecosystem-based public health interventions should always follow system-specific evidence, and be paired with greater investment in health systems and One Health pathogen surveillance.