期刊名称：Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
印刷版ISSN：0027-8424
电子版ISSN：1091-6490
出版年度：2022
卷号：119
期号：39
DOI：10.1073/pnas.2112341119
语种：English
出版社：The National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America
摘要：Significance
Urbanization is rapidly transforming Southeast Asia, altering the landscape and the interactions between people, animals, and the environment. These changes have the potential to exacerbate many existing health challenges in the region, including those posed by zoonoses. Here, we used a novel, multidisciplinary, ecosystem-level approach to examine the influence of urbanization on zoonotic disease risk in a Southeast Asian city. We infer that urbanization alters the ecology of animal reservoirs, arthropod vectors, and pathogens in a manner that may increase transmission risk from multiple zoonotic diseases in urban areas. This effect was particularly strong for pathogens associated with environmental or tick-borne transmission, providing targets for the development of low-cost interventions to reduce zoonotic disease risk in tropical cities.
Urbanization is rapidly transforming much of Southeast Asia, altering the structure and function of the landscape, as well as the frequency and intensity of the interactions between people, animals, and the environment. In this study, we explored the impact of urbanization on zoonotic disease risk by simultaneously characterizing changes in the ecology of animal reservoirs (rodents), ectoparasite vectors (ticks), and pathogens across a gradient of urbanization in Kuching, a city in Malaysian Borneo. We sampled 863 rodents across rural, developing, and urban locations and found that rodent species diversity decreased with increasing urbanization—from 10 species in the rural location to 4 in the rural location. Notably, two species appeared to thrive in urban areas, as follows: the invasive urban exploiter
Rattus rattus (
n = 375) and the native urban adapter
Sundamys muelleri (
n = 331).
R. rattus was strongly associated with built infrastructure across the gradient and carried a high diversity of pathogens, including multihost zoonoses capable of environmental transmission (e.g.,
Leptospira spp.). In contrast,
S. muelleri was restricted to green patches where it was found at high densities and was strongly associated with the presence of ticks, including the medically important genera
Amblyomma,
Haemaphysalis, and
Ixodes. Our analyses reveal that zoonotic disease risk is elevated and heterogeneously distributed in urban environments and highlight the potential for targeted risk reduction through pest management and public health messaging.
