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View Article and Find Full Text PDFClimate change is expected to threaten human health and well-being via its effects on climate-sensitive infectious diseases, potentially changing their spatial distributions, affecting annual/seasonal cycles, or altering disease incidence and severity. Climate sensitivity of pathogens is a key indicator that diseases might respond to climate change, but the proportion of pathogens that is climate-sensitive, and their characteristics, are not known. The climate sensitivity of European human and domestic animal infectious pathogens, and the characteristics associated with sensitivity, were assessed systematically in terms of selection of pathogens and choice of literature reviewed.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFInteractions between species, particularly where one is likely to be a pathogen of the other, as well as the geographical distribution of species, have been systematically extracted from various web-based, free-access sources, and assembled with the accompanying evidence into a single database. The database attempts to answer questions such as what are all the pathogens of a host, and what are all the hosts of a pathogen, what are all the countries where a pathogen was found, and what are all the pathogens found in a country. Two datasets were extracted from the database, focussing on species interactions and species distribution, based on evidence published between 1950-2012.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFDisease or pathogen risk prioritisations aid understanding of infectious agent impact within surveillance or mitigation and biosecurity work, but take significant development. Previous work has shown the H-(Hirsch-)index as an alternative proxy. We present a weighted risk analysis describing infectious pathogen impact for human health (human pathogens) and well-being (domestic animal pathogens) using an objective, evidence-based, repeatable approach; the H-index.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFUsing the Small Animal Veterinary Surveillance Network (SAVSNET), a national small animal disease-surveillance scheme, information on gastrointestinal disease was collected for a total of 76 days between 10 May 2010 and 8 August 2011 from 16,223 consultations (including data from 9115 individual dogs and 3462 individual cats) from 42 premises belonging to 19 UK veterinary practices. During that period, 7% of dogs and 3% of cats presented with diarrhoea. Adult dogs had a higher proportional morbidity of diarrhoea (PMD) than adult cats (P <0.
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