VICTORIA

The risk of EIDs for human societies is real: outbreaks of Ebola viruses or yet the newly emerged SARS-CoV-2 are the most well-known recent examples of EIDs which emerged locally with a subsequent large scale geographical spread due to our increasingly interconnected world. The majority of EIDs are the result of direct or indirect cross-species transmissions from wildlife to humans. Bats and rodents are the two most diverse and widely distributed mammal orders, accounting for more than 60% of all known mammals’ species. They are natural reservoirs of numerous zoonotic viruses, which dramatically impact human and animal health worldwide. Emerging infections from wildlife often originate from complex multi-host systems and dynamics, with host communities acting as reservoirs and intermediate hosts serving as pathogens circulation bridges and facilitating spillover into the human population. Recombination events following multiple cross-species transmissions can lead to the selection of new strains with increased capacity for transmission to other species. It is thus crucial to understand the complex ecology and interspecies transmission of viruses within sympatric wildlife communities to better comprehend disease emergence. Rodents and bats are small mammals living in dense populations and often sharing the same habitat with consequent increased opportunities for viral exchange. It is therefore of paramount importance to characterise viruses that circulate between communities of bat and rodent populations rather than those which are more order-specific to better understand the dynamics, the ecological factors and the viral characteristics of pathogens which might lead to the emergence of new infectious diseases in the human being. We propose an ambitious and innovative project to better understand cross-species viral transmission and risks of EIDs in southern Africa by exploring the circulation of three families of viruses within, but also between bats and rodents.