The use of a severity index to analyse impact of bacterial zoonoses on welfare of wildlife populations

TL;DR

This paper introduces a severity index to assess how bacterial zoonoses affect the welfare of wildlife populations.

Contribution

The novelty lies in creating a severity index to quantify the impact of zoonotic diseases on wildlife welfare.

Findings

There is a strong negative correlation between pathogen richness and severity index value (SIV).

Conservation concern species do not show a significant decline in SIV with increasing pathogen richness.

Abstract

Increasing disease outbreaks and declining biodiversity underscore the need for understanding the impact pathogens have on wildlife populations. To understand how zoonoses impact wild animal welfare, we created a severity index. Using signs of disease information from a bacterial zoonotic disease database, we quantified severity of each sign of disease combined with the number of welfare domains and body systems the pathogen impacts to find the severity index value (SIV) of each unique host-pathogen relationship. We then investigated the effects of host-pathogen richness and conservation status against SIV. We found there to be a strong, negative correlation between increasing pathogen richness and SIV. Species of least concern (LC) were not significantly more likely to have higher SIV than species of conservation concern (CC), but CC species did not have a significant decline of SIV with increasing pathogen richness. This study provides an insight into the relationships between pathogen richness and the risk of pathogen infections to wildlife.

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