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Global land-use changes including forest fragmentation, agricultural expansion and concentrated livestock production are creating “hotspots” favorable for bats that carry coronaviruses and where conditions are ripe for the diseases to jump from bats to humans, finds a new analysis by researchers at the Politecnico di Milano, University of California, Berkeley and Massey University.
BERKELEY Global land-use changes including forest fragmentation, agricultural expansion and concentrated livestock production are creating “hot spots” favorable for bats that carry coronaviruses and where conditions are ripe for the diseases to jump from bats to humans, finds an analysis published this week by researchers at the University of California, Berkeley, the Politecnico di Milano (Polytechnic University of Milan) and Massey University of New Zealand.
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Agricultural expansion, human settlements, concentrated livestock production and forest fragmentation. These are just some of the global land-use changes, unsustainable for the environment, which have taken place in recent years. These changes are creating “hotspots”, that are areas where conditions are ripe for the transmission of coronaviruses from wild animals to humans.
This is what emerges from a study just published in Nature Food, by a team of researchers composed of Maria Cristina Rulli and Nikolas Galli of the Politecnico di Milano, Paolo D’Odorico of the University of California at Berkeley (USA) and David Hayman of Massey University (New Zealand).