Drivers for emerging issues in animal and plant health

Richardson, Jane; Lockhart, Caryl; Pongolini, Stefano; Karesh, William B.; Baylis, Matthew; Goldberg, Tony; Slingenbergh, Jan; Gale, Paul; Venturini, Tommaso; Catchpole, Mike; de Balogh, Katinka; Pautasso, Marco; Broglia, Alessandro; Berthe, Franck; Schans, Jan; Poppy, Guy

The recent outbreak of Ebola virus disease affecting Western Africa is the largest ever documented Ebola outbreak, with reported cases and deaths that have exceeded any previous historical outbreaks. It is also the largest outbreak in terms of geographical spread. A legitimate question was raised about 'why there and why then?' (Bausch and Schwarz, 2014) . In order to identify the drivers for this spillover of Ebola virus from animals to humans, which triggered the rapid spread of infection within a geographically dispersed population, a set of drivers was identified from the scientific literature. This corpus of papers (including original research and review papers) was then used to analyse the network of drivers and visualise their behaviour (EFSA, 2015) . The analysis included 40 drivers, which were Drivers for emerging issues in animal and plant health www.efsa.europa.eu/efsajournal found to be connected through 142 linkages. The visualisation of the driver network revealed a few central drivers involved in the spillover. Two main limitations were identified during the project. One of them was the limited number of documented spillover events from which scientific evidence was available. The second was the limited number of publications, which specifically, or explicitly, use the concept of drivers.