Deer mouse photo by National Park Service, via Wikimedia Commons
We should all be concerned with animal diseases, especially if those pathogens have the potential to become zoonotic, or transmittable to human beings. And if you agree that biodiversity is one of Earth’s great treasures and essential to the health of its ecosystems, then it won’t come as a surprise to hear that there seems to be a link between a habitat’s biodiversity and fewer zoonotic diseases in the respective area.
This situation is known as the dilution effect in epidemiology, and Jason Goldman reports for University of Washington’s Conservation Magazine on the case of a certain hantavirus (which is a zoonotic virus carried by rodents) studied within deer mice in Utah:
Deer mice are the natural hosts for the Sin Nombre hantavirus, or SNV. When contracted by humans, the virus can lead to the sometimes fatal Hantavirus Pulmonary Syndrome.
To test the dilution effect in a deer mouse population, the researchers trapped 155 of the rodents on BLM land in Juab County, Utah, and implanted small microchips inside them. They also took a small blood sample to test for SNV infection. Then they distributed an array of feeding trays in the desert, half in areas of high biodiversity and half in areas of low biodiversity.
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