Maybe not what you want to hear if you’re worried about superspreader events.
Humans apparently aren’t the only ones to have mastered the “superspreader” event. Macaques too have got it down pat.
In new research, a team from multiple universities, including the University of California, Davis, has mapped how infectious diseases make their way through wildlife populations where humans and wildlife hang out in close proximity.
The team’s report was published earlier this year in Scientific Reports.
Led by Dr Krishna Balasubramaniam, a conservation and animal behaviour lecturer at the UK’s Anglia Ruskin University, the team monitored the behaviour of rhesus macaques, long-tailed macaques, and bonnet macaques in northern India, Malaysia, and southern India.
Wild macaques often cross paths with humans in these areas – and there’s frequently food involved.
The team then used epidemiological computer models to simulate how infectious diseases may spread among monkeys living in urban and peri-urban areas of Asia.
They discovered the monkeys with the most human interactions were the ones responsible for the worst outbreaks of disease. The places where humans and monkeys most frequently came into contact, such as those that were sources of food, were the ones that attracted different groups and subgroups of the primates.
It is at these human-wildlife hotspots that monkeys closely interact with monkeys they wouldn’t regularly mix with, leading to larger outbreaks.
Compare it with hosting a barbecue. If you invite your mates, those are typically the ones that show up (along with a few uninvited neighbours who want in on a free feed). Whereas if you go out to dinner, you’ll find characters from all sorts of groups and areas, which can lead to the sharing of pathogens into new communities.
Because the global population is growing dramatically and people are increasingly sticking up houses and settlements closer to wildlife habitats, there’s a two-fold risk: there are the zoonotic diseases that move from wildlife to humans, but then there’s also the zooanthroponotic diseases that spill back from humans, causing outbreaks among wildlife.
Not surprisingly, this is a lose-lose situation, both for the macaques and their not-so distant cousins (that’s us, folks).
Share your bananas, but not your pathogens, with penny@medicalrepublic.com.au.
