Deforestation-driven food-web collapse linked to emerging tropical infectious disease, Mycobacterium ulcerans
Résumé
Generalist microorganisms are the agents of many emerging infectious diseases (EIDs), but their natural life cycles
are difficult to predict due to the multiplicity of potential hosts and environmental reservoirs. Among 250 known
human EIDs, many have been traced to tropical rain forests and specifically freshwater aquatic systems, which act as
an interface between microbe-rich sediments or substrates and terrestrial habitats. Along with the rapid urbanization
of developing countries, population encroachment, deforestation, and land-use modifications are expected to
increase the risk of EID outbreaks. We show that the freshwater food-web collapse driven by land-use change has a
nonlinear effect on the abundance of preferential hosts of a generalist bacterial pathogen, Mycobacterium ulcerans.
This leads to an increase of the pathogen within systems at certain levels of environmental disturbance. The
complex link between aquatic, terrestrial, and EID processes highlights the potential importance of species community
composition and structure and species life history traits in disease risk estimation and mapping. Mechanisms
such as the one shown here are also central in predicting how human-induced environmental change, for example,
deforestation and changes in land use, may drive emergence.
Domaines
Cancer
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