Spatial dynamics of a zoonotic orthohantavirus disease through heterogenous data on rodents, rodent infections, and human disease.

Zoonotic diseases are challenging to study from the ecological point of view as, broadly speaking, datasets tend to be either detailed on a small spatial extent, or coarse on a large spatial extent. Also, there are many ways to assess zoonotic disease transmission systems, from pathogens to hosts to humans. We explore the complementarity of datasets considering the pathogen in its host, the host and human cases in the context of Puumala orthohantavirus infection in Germany.

Preliminary insights into the genetics of bank vole tolerance to Puumala hantavirus in Sweden.

Natural reservoirs of zoonotic pathogens generally seem to be capable of tolerating infections. Tolerance and its underlying mechanisms remain difficult to assess using experiments or wildlife surveys. High-throughput sequencing technologies give the opportunity to investigate the genetic bases of tolerance, and the variability of its mechanisms in natural populations.

High Resolution Spatial Analysis of Habitat Preference of Aedes Albopictus (Diptera: Culicidae) in an Urban Environment.

Over the past decades, the Asian tiger mosquito (Aedes albopictus (Skuse, 1895)) has emerged in many countries, and it has colonized new environments, including urban areas. The species is a nuisance and a potential vector of several human pathogens, and a better understanding of the habitat preferences of the species is needed for help in successful prevention and control. So far, the habitat preference in urban environments has not been studied in Southern European cities.

Landscape and regional environmental analysis of the spatial distribution of hantavirus human cases in europe.

Background: In Europe, the most prevalent hantavirus, Puumala virus, is transmitted by bank voles and causes nephropathia epidemica in human. The European spatial distribution of nephropathia epidemica is investigated here for the first time with a rich set of environmental variables.

Methods: The influence of variables at the landscape and regional level is studied through multilevel logistic regression, and further information on their effects across the different European ecoregions is obtained by comparing an overall niche model (boosted regression trees) with regressions by ecoregion.

Shaping zoonosis risk: landscape ecology vs. landscape attractiveness for people, the case of tick-borne encephalitis in Sweden.

Background: In this paper, the hazard and exposure concepts from risk assessment are applied in an innovative approach to understand zoonotic disease risk. Hazard is here related to the landscape ecology determining where the hosts, vectors and pathogens are and, exposure is defined as the attractiveness and accessibility to hazardous areas. Tick-borne encephalitis in Sweden was used as a case study.

Modelling zoonotic diseases in humans: comparison of methods for hantavirus in Sweden.

Because their distribution usually depends on the presence of more than one species, modelling zoonotic diseases in humans differs from modelling individual species distribution even though the data are similar in nature. Three approaches can be used to model spatial distributions recorded by points: based on presence/absence, presence/available or presence data. Here, we compared one or two of several existing methods for each of these approaches.