Search arXivSearch

arXiv · 1312.6879

Zoonoses Frontier: Veterinarian, Producer, Processor and Beyond

Abstract

As many emerging and re-emerging infectious diseases are associated with food animals, the relationship between available healthy food sources and population health and social stability has become evident. A recent example of the importance of this relationship was observed during the current flu pandemic. This recent pandemic brought attention to novel target groups of susceptible people at the interface of the animal and human populations. Veterinarians, producers and processors are uniquely exposed to emerging zoonoses. Therefore these individuals may serve as key sentinels and allow efficient evaluation of the effectiveness of zoonoses prophylaxis and control, including evaluation of the cost-effectiveness in the broader view. We also suggest some valuable approaches for rapid diagnosis of emerging and re-emerging infectious diseases and supportive systemic research which may address related ethical questions. We also highly recommend more research investigations characterizing this human/animal zoonosis interface, a potentially productive target for emerging disease diagnosis and control.

Explore related subjects

Keep this discovery

Explore connections, maps & timelines

BibTeXRIS

Min Yue, Huanchun Chen. 2013-12-24. Zoonoses Frontier: Veterinarian, Producer, Processor and Beyond. https://arxiv.org/abs/1312.6879

Cite the original work for its findings. Save a collection to share your selection of sources.

KEEP EXPLORING

Related papers

Evolution as fitness landscape navigation: concepts, measures, and emerging questions

Fitness landscapes are mappings between genotypes, phenotypes, and fitness that shape evolution. In recent years, empirical work and theoretical models have greatly advanced our understanding of how populations navigate rugged fitness landscapes. Here, we provide a timely review of the theoretical aspects of this field. Its rapidly growing literature employs a wide range of terms, which are sometimes used ambiguously or inconsistently. We therefore begin by defining the major concepts and the field's vocabulary, highlighting our own terminology choices wherever needed. We then review key results on the relationships between epistasis, ruggedness, accessibility, and navigability for genotype-fitness maps, highlighting several complex and sometimes counterintuitive connections that have emerged. Further, we review how the conserved structural properties of the underlying genotype-phenotype map, which can lead to the formation of large connected neutral networks of genotypes, influence dynamics on fitness landscapes. We then compare the two levels to study landscape navigation: the level of genotype-phenotype maps and the level of genotype-fitness maps. Our review leads us to propose a new measure of navigability, based on evolutionary outcomes, that is broadly applicable and overcomes limitations of existing measures. Finally, we highlight examples from the smaller body of work that relaxes the common assumption of fitness-monotonic paths on static landscapes, and discuss how this can fundamentally change the nature of fitness landscape navigation. Throughout the review, we identify directions for future work to fill existing gaps and to synthesize the disparate strands of research within the field.

q-bio.PE

Best Matches in Phylogenetic Networks

Best match graphs (BMGs) were introduced in mathematical phylogenetics to describe the concept of closest relatives for related genes (leaves of rooted tree) in different organisms (defining leaf colors). We generalize this concept here to leaf-colored rooted networks, where least common ancestors are in general neither unique nor comparable. We characterize BMGs of rooted networks as those vertex-colored digraphs that are properly colored and satisfy an easy-to-check condition that we call the sicor-in-hub property. BMGs can be recognized in linear time and an explaining network can be constructed in quadratic time. Analogous results are obtained for reciprocal best match graphs (RBMGs), where an edge $\{x,y\}$ corresponds to pairs of vertices with different color that are mutually closest relatives.

q-bio.PE

Exact Counts of Binary Phylogenetic Networks with Four Reticulations

Phylogenetic networks provide a flexible framework for representing reticulate evolutionary processes, such as hybridization, introgression, recombination, and horizontal gene transfer. However, their combinatorial complexity makes even basic enumeration problems difficult. Building on our previous work for networks with up to three reticulations, we derive an explicit closed-form formula for the number of unrestricted rooted binary phylogenetic networks with four reticulations on \(n\) labeled taxa. Our approach is based on tree-component graphs. We classify the 79 possible component graphs corresponding to networks with four reticulations into ten groups. We then enumerate the networks associated with each group by combining known counts of one-component networks, forests, and networks with fewer reticulations. Summing these contributions yields the desired formula. This result extends the exact enumeration of unrestricted binary phylogenetic networks to four reticulations and further demonstrates the effectiveness of component graphs for systematically organizing and counting increasingly complex network classes.

q-bio.PE