sacred cows and sympathetic squirrels the importance of biological diversity to human health神圣的牛和同情松鼠生物多样性对人类健康的重要性.pdfVIP

Essay Sacred Cows and Sympathetic Squirrels: The Importance of Biological Diversity to Human Health * Andy Dobson , Isabella Cattadori, Robert D. Holt, Richard S. Ostfeld, Felicia Keesing, Kristle Krichbaum, Jason R. Rohr, Sarah E. Perkins, Peter J. Hudson hy are cows sacred? Travel anywhere in India and they Whave the right of way. Travel anywhere in the eastern United States and you’ll see squirrels, more than likely, as roadkill. Yet both species serve a similar epidemiological function: they receive bites from infected vectors that might otherwise have bitten humans, and they break the chain of pathogen transmission. In the case of Indian cattle, the bites are from mosquitoes infected with malaria parasites; the squirrels, on the other hand, receive their bites from ticks infected with the spirochetes that cause Lyme disease. In both cases, the presence of a relatively ineffi cient host species has reduced the rate of infectious disease spread into the human host population. Recently, ecologists have uncovered several other ways in which species diversity can benefi t human health. DOI: 10.1371/journal.pmed.0030231.g001 In this Essay, we describe how disease Figure 1. Cow and Proud Owner in Dacca, Bangladesh risk is infl uenced by biological diversity and, specifi cally, how some host species act to reduce the risk of transmission of explain why cows are regarded with reduce the rate at which mosquitoes virulent zoonotic pathogens to people. deep reverence by Hindus. A variety of bite humans, and thus reduce the This represents an exciting area of historical papers have suggested that likelihood of infection with malaria study where ecologists, conservation sleeping in clo