The accelerated infectious disease risk in the Anthropocene: more outbreaks and wider global spread

Serge Morand; Bruno Andreas Walther

To collate the total number of infectious disease outbreaks over the years 1940-2018, we extracted the relevant data from the medical database called GIDEON (GIDEON Informatics, 2020) which contains information on the presence and occurrence of epidemics of human infectious diseases in each country as well as the number of surveys conducted in each country. The GIDEON data are curated as records of confirmed outbreaks, are continually updated using various sources such as WHO and Promed, and are accessible via subscription. This dataset is generally considered to be the most complete, reliable, and up-to-date in the world and has been regularly used in previous macro-scale studies of infectious disease, epidemics, and pathogen diversity (e.g., Smith et al., 2007; Dunn et al., 2010; Morand et al., 2013; Morand et al., 2014; Poisot et al., 2014; Smith et al., 2014; Morand, 2015; Morand and Walther, 2018) . Each row in the GIDEON dataset specifies the disease 'species', the year and the country of the outbreak. The 'annual total outbreak number' is simply the annual total number of outbreaks regardless of the disease designation and including all countries. The 'annual total disease number' uses the same data for each year as the 'annual total outbreak number' but then counts only the different infectious diseases which had at least one outbreak in that respective year. The 'annual total country number' uses the same data for each year as the 'annual total outbreak number' but then counts only the different countries which had at least one outbreak in that respective year. Our entire 1940-2018 dataset contains 17424 outbreaks of 361 human infectious diseases in 224 nations.