Benny Borremans

Wildlife Health Ecology Research Organization

Pathogen spillover between different host species is the trigger for many infectious disease outbreaks and emergence events, and ecosystem boundary areas have been suggested as spatial hotspots of spillover. This hypothesis is largely based on suspected higher rates of zoonotic disease spillover and emergence in fragmented landscapes and other area...

1. Studies of infectious disease ecology would benefit greatly from knowing when individuals were infected, but estimating this time of infection can be challenging, especially in wildlife. Time of infection can be estimated from various types of data, with antibody-level data being one of the most promising sources of information. The use of antib...

Domoic acid (DA) is a glutaminergic excitatory neurotoxin that causes morbidity and mortality of California sea lions (Zalophus californianus; CSL) and other marine mammals due to a suite of effects mostly on the nervous and cardiac systems. Between 1998 and 2019, 11,737 live-stranded CSL were admitted to The Marine Mammal Center (TMMC; Sausalito,...

Prediction and management of zoonotic pathogen spillover requires an understanding of infection dynamics within reservoir host populations. Transmission risk is often assessed using prevalence of infected hosts, with infection status based on the presence of genomic material. However, detection of viral genomic material alone does not necessarily i...

Leptospirosis, the most widespread zoonotic disease in the world, is broadly understudied in multi-host wildlife systems. Knowledge gaps regarding Leptospira circulation in wildlife, particularly in densely populated areas, contribute to frequent misdiagnoses in humans and domestic animals. We assessed Leptospira prevalence levels and risk factors...

Leptospirosis is the most widespread zoonotic disease in the world, yet it is broadly understudied in multi-host wildlife systems. Knowledge gaps regarding Leptospira circulation in wildlife, particularly in densely populated areas, contribute to frequent misdiagnoses in humans and domestic animals. We assessed Leptospira prevalence levels and risk...

----- bioRxiv: https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2022.10.03.510698v1 ----- Studies of infectious disease ecology often rely heavily on knowing when individuals were infected, but estimating this time of infection can be challenging, especially in wildlife. Time of infection can be estimated from various types of data, with antibody level dat...

The trend of the number of publications on a research field is often used to quantify research interest and effort, but this measure is biased by general publication record inflation. This study introduces a novel metric as an unbiased and quantitative tool for trend analysis and bibliometrics. The metric was used to reanalyze reported publication...

Background: Despite significant advances in statistical approaches and data collection for analyzing wildlife movements over the last 50 years, there are limited analytical frameworks to be applied when spatial data are collected for purposes other than analyzing movement. Data collected for other purposes (e.g., sporadic captures or survival check...

The spirochete bacterium Leptospira interrogans serovar Pomona is enzootic to California sea lions (CSL; Zalophus californianus) and causes periodic epizootics. Leptospirosis in CSL is associated with a high fatality rate in rehabilitation. Evidence-based tools for estimating prognosis and guiding early euthanasia of animals with a low probability...

Ecological and evolutionary processes govern the fitness, propagation, and interactions of organisms through space and time, and viruses are no exception. While COVID-19 research has primarily emphasized virological, clinical, and epidemiological perspectives, crucial aspects of the pandemic are fundamentally ecological or evolutionary. Here, we hi...

For wildlife diseases, one often relies on host density to predict host infection prevalence and the subsequent force of infection to humans in the case of zoonoses. Indeed, if transmission is mainly indirect, i.e., by way of the environment, the force of infection is expected to increase with host density, yet the laborious field data supporting t...

https://elifesciences.org/articles/60122 ---------------------------------------------------- Understanding and mitigating SARS-CoV-2 transmission hinges on antibody and viral RNA data that inform exposure and shedding, but extensive variation in assays, study group demographics and laboratory protocols across published studies confounds inference...

Understanding and mitigating SARS-CoV-2 transmission hinges on antibody and viral RNA data that inform exposure and shedding, but extensive variation in assays, study group demographics and laboratory protocols across published studies confounds inference of true biological patterns. Our meta-analysis leverages 3214 datapoints from 516 individuals...

Understanding and mitigating SARS-CoV-2 transmission hinges on antibody and viral RNA data that inform exposure and shedding, but extensive variation in assays, study group demographics and laboratory protocols across published studies confounds inference of true biological patterns. Our meta-analysis leverages 3214 datapoints from 516 individuals...

Our ability to understand and mitigate the spread of SARS-CoV-2 depends largely on antibody and viral RNA data that provide information about past exposure and shedding. Five months into the outbreak there is an impressive number of studies reporting antibody kinetics and RNA shedding dynamics, but extensive variation in detection assays, study gro...

Our ability to understand and mitigate the spread of SARS-CoV-2 depends largely on antibody and viral RNA data that provide information about past exposure and shedding. Five months into the outbreak there is an impressive number of studies reporting antibody kinetics and RNA shedding dynamics, but extensive variation in detection assays, study gro...

A key aim in wildlife disease ecology is to understand how host and parasite characteristics influence parasite transmission and persistence. Variation in host population density can have strong impacts on transmission and outbreaks, and theory predicts particular transmission–density patterns depending on how parasites are transmitted between indi...

Managing pathogen spillover at the wildlife–livestock interface is a key step towards improving global animal health, food security and wildlife conservation. However, predicting the effectiveness of management actions across host–pathogen systems with different life histories is an on-going challenge since data on intervention effectiveness are ex...

The yearly influx of susceptibles in a population (through births) is a key driver of seasonal disease outbreaks in many wildlife species. Environment can have additional effects on outbreak size and seasonality by acting on host immunity, transmission rates, or survival. A key challenge in disease ecology has been to assess the relative importance...

[This corrects the article DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0215224.].

A BSTRACT Managing pathogen spillover at the wildlife-livestock interface is a key step toward improving global animal health, food security, and wildlife conservation. However, predicting the effectiveness of management actions across host-pathogen systems with different life histories is an on-going challenge since data on intervention effectiven...

Rodents serve as reservoirs and/or vectors for several human infections of high morbidity and mortality in the tropics. Population growth and demographic shifts over the years have increased contact with these mammals, thereby increasing opportunities for disease transmission. In Africa, the burden of rodent-borne diseases is not well described. To...

Demographic information of villages sampled. (DOCX)

The Natal multimammate mouse (Mastomys natalensis) is the reservoir host of Lassa virus, an arenavirus that causes Lassa haemorrhagic fever in humans in West Africa. Because no vaccine exists and therapeutic options are limited, preventing infection through rodent control and human behavioural measures is currently considered to be the only option....

The linear no-threshold (LNT) risk model is the current human health risk assessment paradigm. This model states that adverse stochastic biological responses to high levels of a stressor can be used to estimate the response to low or moderate levels of that stressor. In recent years the validity of the LNT risk model has increasingly been questione...

Automated animal monitoring via radio‐frequency identification (RFID) technology allows efficient and extensive data sampling of individual activity levels and is therefore commonly used for ecological research. However, processing RFID data is still a largely unresolved problem, which potentially leads to inaccurate estimates for behavioral activi...

Background: Parasite evolution is hypothesized to select for levels of parasite virulence that maximise transmission success. When host population densities fluctuate, low levels of virulence with limited impact on the host are expected, as this should increase the likelihood of surviving periods of low host density. We examined the effects of Mor...

Models of disease transmission in a population with changing densities must assume a relation between infectious contacts and density. Typically, a choice is made between a constant (frequency-dependence) and a linear (density-dependence) contact–density function, but it is becoming increasingly clear that intermediate, nonlinear functions are more...

Supporting Code for The shape of the contact-density function matters when modelling disease transmission in fluctuating populations

Supporting Information to The shape of the contact-density function matters when modelling disease transmission in fluctuating populations

Exploration and activity are often described as trade-offs between the fitness benefits of gathering information and resources, and the potential costs of increasing exposure to predators and parasites. More exploratory individuals are predicted to have higher rates of parasitism, but this relationship has rarely been examined for virus infections...

Infectious diseases of wildlife are typically studied using data on antibody and pathogen levels. In order to interpret these data, it is necessary to know the course of antibodies and pathogen levels after infection. Such data are typically collected using experimental infection studies in which host individuals are inoculated in the laboratory an...

In Africa, indigenous multimammate mice (Mastomys natalensis) only appear to live commensally in houses when invasive black rats (Rattus rattus) are absent, yet little is known about the underlying mechanism. Avoidance through smell may cause the absence of M. natalensis from areas occupied by R. rattus, but this hypothesis has not yet been tested....

Background: In order to optimize net transmission success, parasites are hypothesized to evolve towards causing minimal damage to their reservoir host while obtaining high shedding rates. For many parasite species however this paradigm has not been tested, and conflicting results have been found regarding the effect of arenaviruses on their rodent...

Infectious diseases of wildlife are typically studied using data on antibody and pathogen presence/level. In order to interpret these data, it is necessary to know the course of antibodies and pathogen presence/levels after infection. Such data are typically collected using experimental infection studies in which host individuals are inoculated in...

In Africa, indigenous multimammate mice (Mastomys natalensis) only appear to live commensally in houses when invasive black rats (Rattus rattus) are absent, yet little is known about the underlying mechanism. Avoidance through smell may cause the absence of M. natalensis from areas occupied by R. rattus, but this hypothesis has not yet been tested....

Models of disease transmission in a population with varying densities must assume a relation between infectious contacts and density. Typically, a choice is made between a constant (frequency-dependence) and a linear (density-dependence) contact-density function, but it is becoming increasingly clear that nonlinear functions intermediate between th...

Models of disease transmission in a population with varying densities must assume a relation between infectious contacts and density. Typically, a choice is made between a constant (frequency-dependence) and a linear (density-dependence) contact-density function, but it is becoming increasingly clear that nonlinear functions intermediate between th...

Author Summary Reservoirs of zoonotic viruses are usually equated with a particular wildlife species. It is rarely assessed whether genetic groups below the species level may instead represent the actual reservoir, though this would have major implications on estimations of the zoonosis’ spatial distribution. Here we investigate whether geographica...

Supplementary information on material and methods. Genotyping mitochondrial and smcy markers. Arenavirus screening and genotyping. Table A. Overview and details of different arenavirus screening and genotyping RT-PCR assays used in this study. Supplementary Results. Prevalences per locality. M. natalensis relatedness (kinship). (DOCX)

Maximum-likelihood phylogenetic tree based on cytochrome b sequences of Mastomys natalensis sampled in this study and in Colangelo et al. (2013) [43]. (PDF)

Phylogenetic trees constructed in MrBayes [77] using GTR substitution model with unconstrained branch lengths, based on (A) a 340 nt partial sequence of the L gene, (B) up to 1512 nt partial sequence of GPC gene, and (C) 542 nt partial sequence of NP gene. Trees were rooted on Lujo virus. Sequences of all known rodent-borne arenaviruses (except Luj...

Landscape resistance (in terms of the reciprocal of M. natalensis habitat quality) between each pair of transect localities (see main text Fig 1). In boldface are pairwise values between neighbouring localities, which are also depicted in Fig 3 in the main text. (XLSX)

Average (circles) and standard error (error bars) of Li’s relatedness coefficient between pairs of M. natalensis individuals from each locality. (PDF)

Seasonal precipitation patterns across Tanzania. Base layer is relative altitude. The average monthly precipitation for selected weather stations is depicted in the graphs. Sampled localities are indicated by red dots, black dots represent the weather stations from which the precipitation data was derived. The numbers next to the black dots indicat...

Online: http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/oik.03623/full Density-dependent shifts in population processes like territoriality, reproduction, dispersal, and parasite transmission are driven by changes in contacts between individuals. Despite this, surprisingly little is known about how contacts change with density, and thus the mechanisms...

Background: A unit of the European Mobile Laboratory (EMLab) consortium was deployed to the Ebola virus disease (EVD) treatment unit in Guéckédou, Guinea, from March 2014 through March 2015. Methods: The unit diagnosed EVD and malaria, using the RealStar Filovirus Screen reverse transcription-polymerase chain reaction (RT-PCR) kit and a malaria...

Matlab code and transmission model simulation results. This file contains the Matlab code used to generate the results in this article, as well as the data. The datafile consists of 3 matrices, where the columns are the daily model situations (increasing in time from left to right, starting after a 500-day burn-in period and selected within a 5 ha...

(a): Frequency distribution of entropy values for different levels of additional information; (b) Correlation between entropy and the mean absolute difference between estimated and real time since infection. Different lines (a, b, c, d) correspond with the respective situations in Fig 7 in the main text. (EPS)

Estimation error (MSE) for different sampling intervals (Δt) and different sample size corrected encounter probabilities (m) (ab: antibody, vb: virus in blood, ve: virus in excretions, age: individual age); (a) and (c) are based on ab presence/absence, while (b) and (d) are based on ab levels; (a) and (b) only include ab information, while (c) and...

Diseases of humans and wildlife are typically tracked and studied through incidence, the number of new infections per time unit. Estimating incidence is not without difficulties, as asymptomatic infections, low sampling intervals and low sample sizes can introduce large estimation errors. After infection, biomarkers such as antibodies or pathogens...

We report two cases of Ebola Viral Disease (EVD) in pregnant women. Both women were in the second trimester and survived. The foetus was initially alive. After respectively 31-32 days post negativation maternal blood EVD-PCR, both patients delivered a stillborn foetus with persistent PCR positivity of the amniotic fluid.

Many infectious diseases in humans, such as Ebola or SARS, originate from animals. In order to know when and how humans can become infected, we need to understand how such infections circulate in their animal reservoir hosts in nature. This thesis investigated the transmission dynamics of Morogoro virus, an African arenavirus, in its natural rodent...

A 2-year capture–mark–recapture study was conducted to estimate home ranges and weekly travel distance of Mastomys natalensis (Smith 1834) in an irrigated rice ecosystem and fallow fields. We found that adults have larger home ranges than subadults in fallow fields but not in rice fields, indicating that fallow fields are more suitable for breeding...