Alliance’ Expert Talk: Wildlife trade drives animal-to-human pathogen transmission over 40 years

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Background

The International Alliance against Health Risks in Wildlife Trade is a global, interdisciplinary network of over 180 organisations and 500 experts working to prevent pathogen spillover by bridging science, policy and practice. The Alliance envisions acting as an incubator for generating and sharing knowledge across its network and beyond. The Expert Talk series has been designed to support this aim by enabling members and inviting experts to share relevant insights and evidence-based knowledge with the community. Learn more about the Alliance’s work on https://alliance-health-wildlife.org/ .

Introduction

The global wildlife trade brings wild animals and humans into close and repeated contact across harvesting, transport, markets, consumption, and captivity. These interactions create opportunities for pathogens to move between species and can contribute to the emergence of infectious diseases. While traded wild animals are known to carry zoonotic pathogens and parasites, it has remained unclear whether traded species are more likely to share pathogens with humans than non-traded species. In this talk, Dr Jérôme Gippet will present a recent study published in Science, combining global wildlife trade records with host-pathogen association data to examine how wildlife trade has shaped animal-to-human pathogen transmission over the past 40 years. The study shows that traded mammals are more likely to share pathogens with humans, that live-animal and illegal trade can further increase this risk, and that the number of pathogens shared with humans increases with the time a species has spent in trade. These findings highlight wildlife trade as an important driver of zoonotic risk and underline the need to better integrate disease surveillance into wildlife trade regulations.

Biography of the presenter

Dr Jérôme Gippet is a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Fribourg, Switzerland. His research explores human–wildlife interactions from both applied and fundamental perspectives in ecology and conservation. Trained as an invasion biologist and urban ecologist at the University of Lyon, he later worked as a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Lausanne, where he investigated emerging exotic pet markets in invertebrates. This work revealed a previously overlooked global trade in pet ants, highlighting important risks for biological invasions (Gippet & Bertelsmeier 2021, PNAS). His research is strongly data-driven and often draws on unconventional sources, such as online pet shops and social media, to better understand wildlife markets and their consequences for biodiversity, invasion dynamics, and pathogen transmission.