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The spread of vector-borne infectious diseases is driven by a complex array of environmental and social drivers, including climate and land-use changes. Global and regional action is urgently needed to tackle carbon emissions and deforestation to halt future outbreaks.
Climate changes can destabilize soil microbial communities, but compound and sequential extreme climate events will magnify the destabilizing effects to other trophic levels — thereby impacting terrestrial biodiversity and ecosystem functioning.
The unprecedented extent of highly pathogenic avian influenza coincides with intensifying global climate changes that alter host ecology and physiology, and could impact virus evolution and dynamics.
Critical thresholds are abrupt changes in ecosystems triggered by environmental disturbances, which can be used to assess resilience and vulnerability. Here, we propose how a trait-based approach could be used to harness the predictive power of microbial dynamics to manage ecosystem response to environmental changes.
The Nagoya Protocol was drafted to ensure the fair and equitable sharing of benefits arising from the international use of genetic resources, but the lack of unified procedures and unclear definitions relating to microorganisms present considerable hurdles to microbiology research.
The global outbreak of H5N1 highly pathogenic avian influenza virus and its high toll on animal populations raise concerns about spillover into humans, but human host barriers need to be considered when estimating transmission potential.
Diagnosis is the weakest aspect of tuberculosis (TB) care and control. We describe seven critical transitions that can close the massive TB diagnostic gap and enable TB programmes worldwide to recover from the pandemic setbacks.
The extent and diversity of exposures to microbial stimuli have a crucial role in regulating the capacity of a host to mount an immune response to a challenge, such as vaccination, making exposure history an important factor to optimize in rodent models.
