Rats ‘less likely’ to cause a pandemic

NEW research shows that rats and other city-dwelling animals are less likely to cause the next pandemic than previously thought.

Researchers at Georgetown University in Washington DC studied data on about nearly 3000 mammals, expecting to find that those living in urban environments hosted more viruses that could be caught by humans.

They found that urban animals did carry 10 times as many kinds of disease, but also that more than 100 times as many studies had been published about them.

But researchers found that rats were no more likely to be the source of a new human disease than other animals. However, “it’s still not a good idea to get too close and friendly to urban wildlife”, said Greg Albery, a disease ecologist who led the study published in the Nature Ecology and Evolution journal this week. “These urban animals are … still often a source of well-known important diseases,” he said, giving the example of leptospirosis, a bacterial disease spread by rats.

The threat of disease from pigeons was also exaggerated, he said.

Albery published research showing climate change could increase the risk of new epidemics – as animals like bats flee to cooler areas, they will mingle with other species for the first time and create new opportunities for diseases that could infect humans. Urban mammals could play a role in this.