The accelerated infectious disease risk in the Anthropocene: more outbreaks and wider global spread

Abstract

The greatly accelerated economic growth during the Anthropocene has resulted in astonishing improvements in many aspects of human well-being, but has also caused the acceleration of risks, such as the interlinked biodiversity and climate crisis. Here, we report on another risk: the accelerated infectious disease risk associated with the number and geographic spread of human infectious disease outbreaks. Using the most complete, reliable, and up-to-date database on human infectious disease outbreaks (GIDEON), we show that the number of disease outbreaks, the number of diseases involved in these outbreaks, and the number of countries affected have increased during the entire Anthropocene. Furthermore, the spatial distribution of these outbreaks is becoming more globalized in the sense that the overall modularity of the disease networks across the globe has decreased, meaning disease outbreaks have become increasingly pandemic in their nature. This decrease in modularity is associated with tremendous increases in mobility, especially in air traffic. We also show that those countries and regions which are most central within these disease networks tend to be countries and global regions with higher GDPs. Therefore, one cost of greater economic growth and the associated increased global mobility is the increased risk of disease outbreaks and their wider spread. Finally, the recent global outbreaks of Covid-19 and monkeypox allowed us to demonstrate that the time of first occurrence in each country was correlated with each countrys centrality value in the disease network. We briefly discuss three different scenarios of how mobility may develop in the future which decision-makers might discuss in light of our results.