How market integration impacts human disease ecology.

Market integration (MI), or the shift from subsistence to market-based livelihoods, profoundly influences health, yet its impacts on infectious diseases remain underexplored. Here, we synthesize the current understanding of MI and infectious disease to stimulate more research, specifically aiming to leverage concepts and tools from disease ecology and related fields to generate testable hypotheses. Embracing a One Health perspective, we examine both human-to-human and zoonotic transmission pathways in their environmental contexts to assess how MI alters infectious disease exposure and susceptibility in beneficial, detrimental and mixed ways.

Disentangling social, environmental, and zoonotic transmission pathways of a gastrointestinal protozoan (Blastocystis spp.) in northeast Madagascar.

Objectives: Understanding disease transmission is a fundamental challenge in ecology. We used transmission potential networks to investigate whether a gastrointestinal protozoan (Blastocystis spp.) is spread through social, environmental, and/or zoonotic pathways in rural northeast Madagascar.

A New Paradigm for Pandemic Preparedness.

Purpose Of Review: Preparing for pandemics requires a degree of interdisciplinary work that is challenging under the current paradigm. This review summarizes the challenges faced by the field of pandemic science and proposes how to address them.

Recent Findings: The structure of current siloed systems of research organizations hinders effective interdisciplinary pandemic research.

Astroviruses in terrestrial Malagasy mammals.

Small terrestrial mammals are major hosts of infectious agents responsible for zoonotic diseases. Astroviruses (AstVs)-the cause of non-bacterial gastroenteritis mainly affecting young children-have been detected in a wide array of mammalian and avian host species. However, understanding the factors that influence AstV infection within and across hosts is limited.

Using phylogeographic link-prediction in primates to prioritize human parasite screening.

Objectives: The ongoing risk of emerging infectious disease has renewed calls for understanding the origins of zoonoses and identifying future zoonotic disease threats. Given their close phylogenetic relatedness and geographic overlap with humans, non-human primates (NHPs) have been the source of many infectious diseases throughout human evolution. NHPs harbor diverse parasites, with some infecting only a single host species while others infect species from multiple families.

Explaining the primate extinction crisis: predictors of extinction risk and active threats.

Explaining why some species are disproportionately impacted by the extinction crisis is of critical importance for conservation biology as a science and for proactively protecting species that are likely to become threatened in the future. Using the most current data on threat status, population trends, and threat types for 446 primate species, we advance previous research on the determinants of extinction risk by including a wider array of phenotypic traits as predictors, filling gaps in these trait data using multiple imputation, and investigating the mechanisms that connect organismal traits to extinction risk. Our Bayesian phylogenetically controlled analyses reveal that insular species exhibit higher threat status, while those that are more omnivorous and live in larger groups have lower threat status.

Predicting primate-parasite associations using exponential random graph models.

Ecological associations between hosts and parasites are influenced by host exposure and susceptibility to parasites, and by parasite traits, such as transmission mode. Advances in network analysis allow us to answer questions about the causes and consequences of traits in ecological networks in ways that could not be addressed in the past. We used a network-based framework (exponential random graph models or ERGMs) to investigate the biogeographic, phylogenetic and ecological characteristics of hosts and parasites that affect the probability of interactions among nonhuman primates and their parasites.

Technological infrastructure, sleep, and rest-activity patterns in a Kaqchikel Maya community.

Sleep duration, quality, and rest-activity pattern-a measure for inferring circadian rhythm-are influenced by multiple factors including access to electricity. Recent findings suggest that the safety and comfort afforded by technology may improve sleep but negatively impact rest-activity stability. According to the circadian entrainment hypothesis, increased access to electric lighting should lead to weaker and less uniform circadian rhythms, measured by stability of rest-activity patterns.

Primate malarias as a model for cross-species parasite transmission.

Parasites regularly switch into new host species, representing a disease burden and conservation risk to the hosts. The distribution of these parasites also gives insight into characteristics of ecological networks and genetic mechanisms of host-parasite interactions. Some parasites are shared across many species, whereas others tend to be restricted to hosts from a single species.

Enriched sleep environments lengthen lemur sleep duration.

Characteristics of the sleep-site are thought to influence the quality and duration of primate sleep, yet only a handful of studies have investigated these links experimentally. Using actigraphy and infrared videography, we quantified sleep in four lemur species (Eulemur coronatus, Lemur catta, Propithecus coquereli, and Varecia rubra) under two different experimental conditions at the Duke Lemur Center (DLC) in Durham, NC, USA. Individuals from each species underwent three weeks of simultaneous testing to investigate the hypothesis that comfort level of the sleep-site influences sleep.

Predictions of primate-parasite coextinction.

Future biodiversity loss threatens the integrity of complex ecological associations, including among hosts and parasites. Almost half of primate species are threatened with extinction, and the loss of threatened hosts could negatively impact parasite associations and ecosystem functions. If endangered hosts are highly connected in host-parasite networks, then future host extinctions will also drive parasite extinctions, destabilizing ecological networks.

Effects of host extinction and vector preferences on vector-borne disease risk in phylogenetically structured host-hector communities.

Anthropogenic disturbance impacts the phylogenetic composition and diversity of ecological communities. While changes in diversity are known to dramatically change species interactions and alter disease dynamics, the effects of phylogenetic changes in host and vector communities on disease have been relatively poorly studied. Using a theoretical model, we investigated how phylogeny and extinction influence network structural characteristics relevant to disease transmission in disturbed environments.

Food insecurity related to agricultural practices and household characteristics in rural communities of northeast Madagascar.

Unlabelled: Ending hunger and alleviating poverty are key goals for a sustainable future. Food security is a constant challenge for agrarian communities in low-income countries, especially in Madagascar. We investigated agricultural practices, household characteristics, and food security in northeast Madagascar.

Gibbon sleep quantified: the influence of lunar phase and meteorological variables on activity in Hylobates moloch and Hylobates pileatus.

Sleep in the primate order remains understudied, with quantitative estimates of sleep duration available for less than 10% of primate species. Even fewer species have had their sleep synchronously quantified with meteorological data, which have been shown to influence sleep-wake regulatory behaviors. We report the first sleep duration estimates in two captive gibbon species, the Javan gibbon (Hylobates moloch) and the pileated gibbon (Hylobates pileatus) (N = 52 nights).

Mitigating Future Respiratory Virus Pandemics: New Threats and Approaches to Consider.

Despite many recent efforts to predict and control emerging infectious disease threats to humans, we failed to anticipate the zoonotic viruses which led to pandemics in 2009 and 2020. The morbidity, mortality, and economic costs of these pandemics have been staggering. We desperately need a more targeted, cost-efficient, and sustainable strategy to detect and mitigate future zoonotic respiratory virus threats.

Epidemiological transitions in human evolution and the richness of viruses, helminths, and protozoa.

Background And Objectives: In absolute terms, humans are extremely highly parasitized compared to other primates. This may reflect that humans are outliers in traits correlated with parasite richness: population density, geographic range area, and study effort. The high degree of parasitism could also reflect amplified disease risk associated with agriculture and urbanization.

One health disparities and COVID-19.

Unlabelled: The global impact of the COVID-19 pandemic has disproportionately affected some communities and populations more than others. We propose that an interdisciplinary framework of 'One Health Disparities' advances understanding of the social and systemic issues that drive COVID-19 in vulnerable populations. One Health Disparities integrates the social environment with One Health perspectives on the interconnectedness of human, animal, and environmental health.

Effects of land use, habitat characteristics, and small mammal community composition on Leptospira prevalence in northeast Madagascar.

Human activities can increase or decrease risks of acquiring a zoonotic disease, notably by affecting the composition and abundance of hosts. This study investigated the links between land use and infectious disease risk in northeast Madagascar, where human subsistence activities and population growth are encroaching on native habitats and the associated biota. We collected new data on pathogenic Leptospira, which are bacteria maintained in small mammal reservoirs.

Effect of urban habitat use on parasitism in mammals: a meta-analysis.

Rates of urbanization are increasing globally, with consequences for the dynamics of parasites and their wildlife hosts. A small subset of mammal species have the dietary and behavioural flexibility to survive in urban settings. The changes that characterize urban ecology-including landscape transformation, modified diets and shifts in community composition-can either increase or decrease susceptibility and exposure to parasites.

Metabarcoding of eukaryotic parasite communities describes diverse parasite assemblages spanning the primate phylogeny.

Despite their ubiquity, in most cases little is known about the impact of eukaryotic parasites on their mammalian hosts. Comparative approaches provide a powerful method to investigate the impact of parasites on host ecology and evolution, though two issues are critical for such efforts: controlling for variation in methods of identifying parasites and incorporating heterogeneity in sampling effort across host species. To address these issues, there is a need for standardized methods to catalogue eukaryotic parasite diversity across broad phylogenetic host ranges.

Eulerian videography technology improves classification of sleep architecture in primates.

Sleep is a critically important dimension of primate behavior, ecology, and evolution, yet primate sleep is under-studied because current methods of analyzing sleep are expensive, invasive, and time-consuming. In contrast to electroencephalography (EEG) and actigraphy, videography is a cost-effective and non-invasive method to study sleep architecture in animals. With video data, however, it is challenging to score subtle changes that occur in different sleep states, and technology has lagged behind innovations in EEG and actigraphy.

Behavioural ecology and infectious disease: implications for conservation of biodiversity.

Behaviour underpins interactions among conspecifics and between species, with consequences for the transmission of disease-causing parasites. Because many parasites lead to declines in population size and increased risk of extinction for threatened species, understanding the link between host behaviour and disease transmission is particularly important for conservation management. Here, we consider the intersection of behaviour, ecology and parasite transmission, broadly encompassing micro- and macroparasites.

Sleep influences cognitive performance in lemurs.

Primates spend almost half their lives asleep, yet little is known about how sleep influences their waking cognition. We hypothesized that diurnal and cathemeral lemurs differ in their need for consistent, non-segmented sleep for next-day cognitive function-including long-term memory consolidation, self-control, foraging efficiency, and sociality. Specifically, we expected that strictly diurnal Propithecus is more reliant on uninterrupted sleep for cognitive performance, as compared to four other lemur species that are more flexibly active (i.