Applied research progress of the ecological niche in vector-borne disease

In recent years, zoonotic infectious diseases, such as Middle East Respiratory Syndrome (MERS), Ebola, highly pathogenic avian influenza, bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE), Severe Acute Respiratory Syndromes (SARS), West Nile fever et al. become an increasing threat to human beings through a variety of transmission routes. It has been currently reported that at least more than 200 kinds of animal infectious diseases and parasitic diseases can be transmitted to humans, which are known as zoonotic infectious diseases. Ecological niche study was conducted to determine the effect of different environmental risk factors on the transmission of vector borne infectious diseases. The literature search was made of articles published up until July 2015 in PubMed. Inclusion criteria contained ecological studies for vector-borne and zoonotic diseases that used ecological niche models. Abstracts and full texts were read and evaluated by two independent readers. We investigate the evidence of 37 studies from a total of 187 selected in PubMed. Initially, 187 abstracts were found in the PubMed, among which 154 full-text articles were retrieved. After screening abstracts and titles, 83 citations were rejected because they were not for vector-borne and zoonotic diseases. 71 abstracts fulfilled the predefined criteria and were included as full texts. Finally, 37 of these fulfilled the inclusion criteria, while the other 34 were excluded because they did not use the ecological niche model. Results derived from ecological studies provide a better understanding of the inner relationship among the pathogen, host, external environment and the influence of different environmental factors on the transmission of infectious diseases. More studies of high quality are needed to investigate ecological factors for vector-borne and zoonotic diseases.