One Health Approach to Emerging Viral and Vector-borne Diseases

Understanding the spatial and temporal distribution of novel infectious diseases is among the most important and challenging tasks for the coming century. Emerging viral and vector-borne diseases are a significant threat to humans, animals, and plants across the globe. In the previous 40 years, the number of new emergent pathogens affecting humans have increased more than 300%. Approximately 60% of these organisms are zoonotic, transferred to humans from animals, and the number of vector-borne pathogens have increased more than 300% in the same time frame. Viruses affecting plants impact agricultural food sources, as well as regional and global economies. Understanding how these pathogens emerge and evolve, transmit from animals to humans and adapt to new hosts to increase morbidity and mortality, spread geospatially and temporally through regions or the global community, and how human behavior and beliefs impact these processes are of critical importance...