Wildlife hosts for OIE-Listed diseases: considerations regarding global wildlife trade and host-pathogen relationships.

The expanding international wildlife trade, combined with a lack of surveillance for key animal diseases in most countries, represents a potential pathway for transboundary disease movement. While the international wildlife trade represents over US $300 billion per year industry involving exchange of billions of individual animals, animal products, and plants as traditional medicines, meat from wild animals, trophies, live exotic pets, commercial products and food, surveillance and reporting of OIE-Listed diseases in wildlife are often opportunistic. We reviewed peer-reviewed literature for reports of 73 OIE-Listed terrestrial animal diseases in wild animals and found 528 possible wild animal hosts using our methodology.