Ebola has a lot of company, researchers say. Since 1980, the world has seen an increasing number of infectious diseases, including enterovirus, tuberculosis, cholera, measles, and various strains of the flu and hepatitis.

Menacing as that may sound, preliminary findings also reveal an encouraging trend.

On a per capita basis, the impact of the outbreaks is declining. In other words, even though the globe faces more outbreaks from more pathogens, they tend to affect a shrinking proportion of the world population.

“We live in a world where human populations are increasingly interconnected with one another and with animals—both wildlife and livestock—that host novel pathogens,” says Katherine Smith, assistant professor of biology at Brown University.

“These connections create opportunities for pathogens to switch hosts, cross borders, and evolve new strains that are stronger than what we have seen in the past.”

The analysis shows that animals are the major source of what ails us. Sixty-five percent of diseases in the dataset were “zoonoses,” meaning they come from animals. Ebola, for instance, may have come from bats. In all, such diseases caused 56 percent of outbreaks since 1980.

Smith and colleagues have compiled their work into a database that is now available online.

12,102 Outbreaks

The researchers developed a “bioinformatics pipeline” to automate the creation of a database comprising 12,102 outbreaks of 215 infectious diseases involving 44 million cases in 219 countries between 1980 and 2013. The analysis is based on data from the prose reports of outbreaks stored in the Global Infectious Disease and Epidemiology Online Network (GIDEON).

The raw numbers reveal a steep rise in the number of outbreaks globally.

“GIDEON defines an outbreak as an increase in the number of cases of disease beyond what would normally be expected in a defined community, geographical area, or season,” says coauthor Sohini Ramachandran, assistant professor of biology.

Between 1980 and 1985 there were well under 1,000 such instances, but for 2005-10, the number surged to nearly 3,000. In those same timeframes, the number of unique diseases causing the trouble climbed from less than 140 to about 160.

The researchers reasoned the increase could be due to factors such as better reporting of outbreaks and information sharing. To account for that, they paired the outbreak data with data on each country’s GDP, press freedom, population size, population density, and even Internet use (after 1990).

Even after controlling for those factors, the numbers of outbreaks and unique causes rose significantly over 33 years. Latitude was also included because previous studies had shown there are more infectious diseases in lower latitudes.

The Top 10

From the analysis, the researchers were not only able to track trends in the total number of outbreaks in each country and around the world, but they could also analyze the host source of the outbreaks. They compiled top 10 lists for each decade of diseases causing the most outbreaks.

For zoonoses in 2000-10, salmonella topped the list followed by e. coli, influenza A, hepatitis A, anthrax, dengue fever, shigellosis, tuberculosis, chikingunya, and trichinosis.

Notably, chikingunya, a painful mosquito-borne virus that has afflicted much of the Caribbean and Central America, was a newcomer in the decade. So was influenza A.

Meanwhile, diseases that were top 10 scourges of earlier decades dropped off the list: campylobacterosis, cryptosporidiosis, and hepatitis E.

Among human-specific infections, gastroenteritis led the 2000s list, trailed by cholera, measles, enterovirus, bacterial meningitis, legionellosis, typhoid and enteric fever, rotavirus, mumps, and pertussis (whooping cough). Notable“newcomers” were mumps and pertussis, but adenoviruses and rubella had fallen out of their former prominence.

It’s good news that although the world seems to face an increasing number of infectious flare-ups from a widening range of tiny foes, we are improving our public health and medical defenses as well, Smith says.

“Our data suggest that, despite an increase in overall outbreaks, global improvements in prevention, early detection, control, and treatment are becoming more effective at reducing the number of people infected,” the authors write.

The analysis is particularly interested in how global infectious disease patterns will shift with climate and land use change, Smith says.

“A warmer world, a world with altered landscapes, and a more urban world will undoubtedly have a new disease-scape to consider.”

Brown’s Institute for the Study of Environment and Society funded the work, which was published in the Journal of the Royal Society Interface.

Cici Bauer, assistant professor of biostatistics, graduate student Samantha Rosenthal, adjunct lecturer Lynn Carlson, and 2013 Brown graduates Michael Goldberg and Jane Chen are coauthors of the study.

Source: Brown University. Republished from Futurity.org under Creative Commons license 3.0. Read the original.