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Hantavirus infection and biodiversity in the Americas

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Abstract

Species diversity has been proposed to decrease prevalence of disease in a wide variety of host–pathogen systems, in a phenomenon labeled the dilution effect. This phenomenon was first proposed and tested for vector-borne diseases but was later extended to directly transmitted parasite systems such as hantavirus. Though there seems to be clear evidence for the dilution effect in some hantavirus/rodent systems, the generality of this hypothesis remains debated. In the present meta-analysis, we examined the evidence supporting the dilution effect for hantavirus/rodent systems in the Americas. General linear models employed on data from 56 field studies identified the abundance of the reservoir rodent species and its relative proportion in the community as the only relevant variables explaining the prevalence of antibodies against hantavirus in the reservoir. Thus, we found no clear support for the dilution effect hypothesis for hantavirus/rodent systems in the Americas.

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Acknowledgements

We are grateful to Richard Douglass for his valuable comments to the manuscript. This work was supported by the National Scientific and Technical Research Council of Argentina (CONICET).

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  1. María Victoria Vadell

    Present address: Instituto Nacional de Medicina Tropical (INMeT)-ANLIS “Dr. Carlos G. Malbrán”, Puerto Iguazú, Misiones, Argentina

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Instituto de Investigación e Ingeniería Ambiental, Universidad Nacional de San Martín, Campus Miguelete, 25 de Mayo y Francia, 1650, San Martín, Buenos Aires, Argentina

    María Victoria Vadell & Aníbal Eduardo Carbajo

  2. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas (CONICET), Buenos Aires, Argentina

    María Victoria Vadell, Isabel Elisa Gómez Villafañe & Aníbal Eduardo Carbajo

  3. Departamento de Ecología, Genética y Evolución, IEGEBA (CONICET-UBA), Facultad de Ciencias Exactas y Naturales, Universidad de Buenos Aires, Buenos Aires, Argentina

    Isabel Elisa Gómez Villafañe

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MVV collected the bibliography, performed the meta-analysis and wrote the first draft of the manuscript; IEGV and AEC contributed substantially to the design of the analysis and to revisions of the manuscript.

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Correspondence to María Victoria Vadell.

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Communicated by Herwig Leirs.

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Vadell, M.V., Gómez Villafañe, I.E. & Carbajo, A.E. Hantavirus infection and biodiversity in the Americas. Oecologia 192, 169–177 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00442-019-04564-0

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