Global macroecologists call attention to lack of shared information on disease-causing organisms

A group of scientists from the Center for Macroecology, Evolution and Climate, the University of Copenhagen, and North Carolina State University recently published a joint statement that called attention to the lack of information regarding worldwide distribution of disease-causing organisms.

The statement, which was published in a recent issue of the journal Nature Ecology and Evolution, said the lack of information makes it hardly possible to predict where and when the next disease outbreak would emerge.

“Today, we know less about where disease-causing organisms occur than the global distribution of most mammals, birds and even ants,” the statement said. “Without this basic knowledge, it is very hard to predict if, for instance, certain bacteria or parasites, transmitted via mosquitoes or other bloodsucking insects, are likely to spread or not, and what measures we must take in order to prevent this.”

While more than 2100 organisms known to make people sick have been registered by worldwide researchers, 355 are defined as “clinically important” and kill approximately 9.6 million people every year. The majority of these deaths occur in the tropical areas of the world and, in most cases, involve parasites.

“Yet, despite the critical global health and economic implications of pathogens and their geography, only a handful have been explored in sufficient detail to allow insights into the global determinants and constraints of their distributions,” the statement said.

They continued, stating that less than five percent of the 355 clinically important human infectious diseases had been mapped reliably at a global and studies of human disease biogeography had been “very coarse spatial grains”.

The statement concludes by citing an example of a worldwide database that’s similar to one the scientists are calling for, called the Global Biodiversity Information Facility, which collects data related to biodiversity and includes more than 700 million records of animals, fungi, and plants. The database is currently shared by 977 institutions worldwide.