![]() ![]() Although recent data have contributed to the awareness of epidemics, the real impact of LF in West African communities will only be possible with the intensification of interdisciplinary efforts in research and public health approaches. Previous estimations on LF burden date from the 80s and it is unclear how the population expansion and the improvement on diagnostics and surveillance methods have affected such predictions. Furthermore, human behaviour, despite playing a key role in the zoonotic nature of the disease, critically affects either the spread or control of human-to-human transmission. Human exposure hinges significantly on LASV ecology, which is in turn shaped by various parameters such as weather seasonality and even virus and rodent-host genetics. Lassa fever (LF), a zoonotic illness, represents a public health burden in West African countries where the Lassa virus (LASV) circulates among rodents. The current synthesis of contextually rich rodent trapping data enriches available information from IUCN, GBIF and CLOVER which can support a more complete understanding of the hazard of zoonotic spillover events. In the interim, studies of spatial pathogen risk informed by rodent distributions must incorporate a measure of the current sampling biases. A priority should be to sample rodent hosts across a greater geographic range to better characterise current and future risk of zoonotic spillover events. ![]() Finally, for these five pathogen groups, we find that the proportion of a rodent hosts range that have been sampled remains small with geographic clustering. and Toxoplasma gondii), we identify host-pathogen associations that have not been previously reported in host-association datasets. For five regionally important zoonotic pathogens (Arenaviridae spp., Borrelia spp., Lassa mammarenavirus, Leptospira spp. We identify that these rodent trapping studies, although biased towards human dominated landscapes across West Africa, can usefully complement current rodent species distribution datasets and we calculate the discrepancies between these datasets. Here, we synthesise data from West Africa from 127 rodent trapping studies, published between 1964-2022, as an additional source of information to characterise the range and presence of rodent species and identify the subgroup of species that are potential or known pathogen hosts. IUCN, GBIF, CLOVER) are often taxonomically and spatially biased. However, available species distribution and host-pathogen association datasets (e.g. A better understanding of the current distribution of rodent species is required to guide attempts to mitigate against potentially increased zoonotic disease hazard and risk. Ongoing anthropogenic land use change is altering these species' abundance and distribution, which among zoonotic host species may increase the risk of zoonoses spillover events. Rodents, a diverse, globally distributed and ecologically important order of mammals are nevertheless important reservoirs of known and novel zoonotic pathogens. ![]()
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