Preliminary Investigation of Schmalhausen’s Law in a Directly Transmitted Pathogen Outbreak System

The past few decades have been marked by drastic modifications to the landscape by anthropogenic processes, leading to increased variability in the environment. For populations that thrive at their distributional boundaries, these changes can affect them drastically, as Schmalhausen’s law predicts t...

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Veröffentlicht in:Viruses Jg. 15; H. 2; S. 310
Hauptverfasser: Filion, Antoine, Sundaram, Mekala, Stephens, Patrick R.
Format: Journal Article
Sprache:Englisch
Veröffentlicht: Switzerland MDPI AG 22.01.2023
MDPI
Schlagworte:
Analysis
Animals
Biological Evolution
Communicable diseases
Communication
Diagnosis
disease ecology
disease emergence
Disease Outbreaks
Disease transmission
ecological boundaries
environmental factors
Epidemics
filovirus
Genotype
landscapes
Marburg marburgvirus
Marburgvirus
Outbreaks
Pathogens
Physiology
Population density
Risk factors
Schmalhausen’s law
spillover
Standard deviation
Temperature
Tropical diseases
Variables
Vector-borne diseases
Vectors (Biology)
Viruses
Zoonoses
Egypt
spillover
ecological boundaries
disease ecology
disease emergence
filovirus
Schmalhausen’s law
ISSN:1999-4915, 1999-4915
Online-Zugang:Volltext
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Zusammenfassung:The past few decades have been marked by drastic modifications to the landscape by anthropogenic processes, leading to increased variability in the environment. For populations that thrive at their distributional boundaries, these changes can affect them drastically, as Schmalhausen’s law predicts that their dynamics are more likely to be susceptible to environmental variation. Recently, this evolutionary theory has been put to the test in vector-borne disease emergences systems, and has been demonstrated effective in predicting emergence patterns. However, it has yet to be tested in a directly transmitted pathogen. Here, we provide a preliminary test of Schmalhausen’s law using data on Marburg virus outbreaks originating from spillover events. By combining the two important aspects of Schmalhausen’s law, namely climatic anomalies and distance to species distributional edges, we show that Marburgvirus outbreaks may support an aspect of this evolutionary theory, with distance to species distributional edge having a weak influence on outbreak size. However, we failed to demonstrate any effect of climatic anomalies on Marburgvirus outbreaks, arguably related to the lack of importance of these variables in directly transmitted pathogen outbreaks. With increasing zoonotic spillover events occurring from wild species, we highlight the importance of considering ecological variability to better predict emergence patterns.
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ISSN:1999-4915
1999-4915
DOI:10.3390/v15020310