Bridging the gap: Using reservoir ecology and human serosurveys to estimate Lassa virus spillover in West Africa.

ABSTRACT: Forecasting the risk of pathogen spillover from reservoir populations of wild or domestic animals is essential for the effective deployment of interventions such as wildlife vaccination or culling. Due to the sporadic nature of spillover events and limited availability of data, developing and validating robust, spatially explicit, predictions is challenging. Recent efforts have begun to make progress in this direction by capitalizing on machine learning methodologies. An important weakness of existing approaches, however, is that they generally rely on combining human and reservoir infection data during the training process and thus conflate risk attributable to the prevalence of the pathogen in the reservoir population with the risk attributed to the realized rate of spillover into the hu

SUBMITTER: Basinski AJ 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC7959400 | biostudies-literature | 2021 Mar

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature