Parasites and wildlife in a changing world: The vector-host- pathogen interaction as a learning case

Rizzoli, Annapaola; Tagliapietra, Valentina; Cagnacci, Francesca; Marini, Giovanni; Arnoldi, Daniele; Rosso, Fausta; Rosà, Roberto

A broad range of factors and events can affect VC at various level of complexity and scale. For instance, global phenomena such as climate and land use changes can affect the occurrence of the vectors and thus the possibility for a vector borne pathogen to circulate (Weaver and Reisen, 2010; Mills et al., 2010) . At a local scale, variation in climatic conditions might affect parameters such as vector longevity and feeding behaviour or changes in vector and reservoir host abundance and competence that can modulate pathogen infection rate in the vectors. In fact, as vector-borne diseases usually arise from the interaction among a vector and a reservoir host, changes in host abundance and host community composition, due for example to intensive land use or wildlife management practices, including artificial feeding, can exert a dramatic effect in terms of changes in hazard, since host can affect both vector abundance and infection prevalence. Therefore, the contributions of specific wildlife species to vector and pathogen maintenance, and the role of a host species in determining risk to a target host may depend on the community composition of hosts and vectors (Ostfeld et al., 2018; Levi et al., 2016b; Levine et al., 2017) . Actually, the assessment of the meta-community structure Esser et al., 2016) is an approach that public health scientists can use to better evaluate the factors that affect times and places for the origin and emergence of infectious diseases.