How accurately can we assess zoonotic risk?

Area of Science:

• Veterinary Medicine
• Epidemiology
• Virology

Background:

• Zoonotic diseases pose significant public health threats.
• Understanding disease emergence from animal reservoirs is crucial for prevention.
• Zoonotic risk assessments are increasingly utilized to predict viral spillover events.

Purpose of the Study:

• To evaluate the accuracy of current zoonotic risk assessment methods.
• To identify limitations in the virological data used for risk assessment.
• To propose alternative strategies for predicting zoonotic disease emergence.

Main Methods:

• Analysis of existing virological datasets.
• Assessment of data completeness and biases.
• Comparison of risk assessment outcomes with actual disease emergence events (where applicable).

Main Results:

• Virological data used in risk assessments are incomplete and biased.
• Ongoing virus discovery rapidly changes the available data landscape.
• Current risk assessments primarily identify hosts with extensive study, not necessarily high-risk hosts.

Conclusions:

• Existing methods for assessing zoonotic risk are likely inaccurate due to data limitations.
• Reliance on biased data may lead to misidentification of high-risk animal reservoirs.
• Virus surveillance at the human-animal interface may offer a more productive approach to understanding disease emergence.