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Emelyanova, A.;  Savolainen, A.;  Oksanen, A.;  Nieminen, P.;  Loginova, O.;  Abass, K.;  Rautio, A. Selected Wildlife Infections in the Circumpolar Arctic. Encyclopedia. Available online: https://encyclopedia.pub/entry/27646 (accessed on 08 July 2025).
Emelyanova A,  Savolainen A,  Oksanen A,  Nieminen P,  Loginova O,  Abass K, et al. Selected Wildlife Infections in the Circumpolar Arctic. Encyclopedia. Available at: https://encyclopedia.pub/entry/27646. Accessed July 08, 2025.
Emelyanova, Anastasia, Audrey Savolainen, Antti Oksanen, Pentti Nieminen, Olga Loginova, Khaled Abass, Arja Rautio. "Selected Wildlife Infections in the Circumpolar Arctic" Encyclopedia, https://encyclopedia.pub/entry/27646 (accessed July 08, 2025).
Emelyanova, A.,  Savolainen, A.,  Oksanen, A.,  Nieminen, P.,  Loginova, O.,  Abass, K., & Rautio, A. (2022, September 27). Selected Wildlife Infections in the Circumpolar Arctic. In Encyclopedia. https://encyclopedia.pub/entry/27646
Emelyanova, Anastasia, et al. "Selected Wildlife Infections in the Circumpolar Arctic." Encyclopedia. Web. 27 September, 2022.
Selected Wildlife Infections in the Circumpolar Arctic
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This entry is adapted from the peer-reviewed paper 10.3390/ijerph191811260

One Health, a multidisciplinary approach to public health, which integrates human, animal, and environmental studies, is prudent for circumpolar Arctic health research. The researchers hope to identify and compare research in select infectious diseases in Arctic wildlife species with importance to human health indexed in English language databases (PubMed, Scopus) and the Russian database eLibrary.ru.

Arctic infectious disease One Health wildlife health zoonosis bibliometric review

1. Introduction

One Health is an approach to policies and research in which multiple disciplines work together to promote public health [1]. It calls for an integrated study of humans, animals (both domestic and wild), and the environment (Figure 1). The One Health paradigm is vital to understanding the complex relationships between health and disease in the circumpolar Arctic [2][3][4][5][6][7].
Figure 1. Environment—wildlife—human interactions in the context of climate change [2].
Humans and wildlife in the Arctic share a unique bond. For most of history, the survival of Indigenous peoples in the Arctic has been completely dependent upon hunting and fishing, due to the scarcity of edible plants [8][9]. Nowadays, humans in the Arctic are also dependent on semidomestic and domestic animals, both native and introduced. In recent decades, a rapidly changing climate and society are straining the balance between humans, animals, and the environment in the Arctic [9][10].
Human, domestic animal, and wildlife health are all challenged by rapid environmental changes, such as spreading infectious and vector-borne diseases [11], mobilization, and toxic substance exposure [12][13]. Risks for humans are assumed to depend on environmental contamination, infection prevalence rates in animal populations, and contact patterns between other humans, the environment, and animals [14]. In recent studies on human infections in the Arctic, it was found that tick-borne diseases, tularemia, anthrax, and vibriosis are most likely to be impacted by climatic factors, and increased temperature and precipitation are predicted to have the greatest impact on those infections [10][11][15][16][17]. Nowadays, especially after the outbreak of coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) and the ensuing pandemic, biosecurity and zoonotic diseases are a central focus, e.g., in the projects of the Arctic Council [18].
However, infections are a natural part of life in the Arctic, as elsewhere. Thousands of different viruses, bacteria, parasites, and fungi contribute to the unique Arctic ecosystem, forming an essential part of its biodiversity alongside humans, animals, and plants [10]. While the consequences of these infections can range from asymptomatic—with no adverse effects on health—to fatal, understanding wildlife infections will also lead to a better understanding of human health. Changes in vectors of wildlife infections are expected and are already reported to have taken place due to climate change and due to the introduction of non-native infectious agents into the Arctic from migrating humans and domestic animals [10][11].

2. Selected Wildlife Infections in the Circumpolar Arctic

Reindeer husbandry is an integral part of the Arctic and is practiced mostly in the Sápmi homeland of northern Fennoscandia and the Arctic Russia [19], and there were altogether 81 articles concerning infectious diseases in reindeer or caribou. While the Fennoscandian reindeer have been spared from brucellosis and anthrax, these bacterial infections have been a nuisance in Russia, where vaccination of reindeer against anthrax was widely practiced during the Soviet era, but not during the last decades [20]. The processes of permafrost thaw, overgrazing, and political interference with herding practices have released B. anthracis spores and caused new anthrax outbreaks.
There is a greater risk of zoonotic infections in the Arctic now than earlier [11][21]. Several zoonotic infections in the Arctic are of special concern and found in all investigated databases, such as viruses causing avian influenza and rabies, bacteria such as Brucella and Francisella, and the parasites Trichinella and Echinococcus. There were other infections studied extensively only in the Russian literature (bacterium Bacillus anthracis) or in English literature (parasites Toxoplasma gondii or Diphyllobothrium spp., canine viruses, and herpesvirus). Other infectious agents such as Cryptosporidium, Giardia, Hypoderma, Marshallagia, Ostertagia, Salmonella, and Morbillivirus were less frequently studied. The research interests vary by longitude. For example, research in Alaska focused heavily on viruses (51% of all papers included in the research), while Finland, Greenland, and Norway have investigated mostly parasites (about 70% of all included papers per country). Bacteria in animals were studied in every Arctic country—comprising as low as 8% of included papers about Alaska and Canada to the maximum of 28% of papers about Russia. Overall, pan-Arctic guidelines are needed for monitoring and surveillance in wildlife, especially for these included infections, which have a significant impact for humans. The importance of zoonotic diseases is clearly seen with the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic.
Increased globalization and human interest in the Arctic bring additional challenges that also impact infectious diseases among wildlife. The rapid influx of people and pets has the potential to introduce new infections, establish new hosts, and alter the environment through industry, construction, and pollution. Additionally, the changes can stress animals, making them more vulnerable to infectious diseases [22]. All of these factors contribute to increasing the risk of infectious diseases to Arctic wildlife and humans [23][24][25], and programs to continuously monitor wildlife infections are urgently needed.

3. Future Directions

3.1. Pathogen Mutation and Host Switch Research

There are several hitherto neglected opportunities for research on zoonotic wildlife infections and those otherwise important for human welfare and food security in the Arctic. The scientific community should be alerted to emerging and re-emerging infections. There is limited scientific evidence on infections traditionally known by Indigenous peoples, who may have learned to recognize the infection as part of their daily living and know how to avoid it [26].
Mutation and host switch of agents from animals to human host could be investigated more actively [27][28]. The world has been and is changing at a rapid pace, and a recent assessment of biomass on Earth estimated the wild mammal biomass to be 0.007 Gt C (gigatons of carbon), while that of humans was 0.06 Gt C and livestock 0.1 Gt C [29]. Therefore, any infective agent “looking for” host switch has higher chances in finding the new host in the abundant and ubiquitous humans or domestic animals than in another wild mammal species.
The COVID-19 pandemic and the most recent multicountry monkeypox outbreak are prime examples of wildlife-derived human infections. Even though they were preceded by previous zoonotic coronavirus epidemics or small-scale local monkeypox outbreaks, the global spread of these human infections was not really expected.
One of the recent studies has found that Nearctic zooparasitic nematode Orthostrongylus macrotis was in a Palearctic host—Taimyr wild reindeer [30]. Supposedly this lungworm was introduced to Russia with muskoxen delivered from North America in the 1970s. This may be a case of host switch (or even double host switch since muskox is not a typical host for this invasive parasite species). There is also a danger of the spread of emerging diseases, such as CWD, among wild and domestic reindeer in the European part of Russia, and there are new studies, e.g., on possible genetic resistance to CWD [31].

3.2. Guidance and Unification of Methodology

The validity and practical utility of observational research depends critically on good study design, appropriate analysis methods, and high-quality reporting and data presentation [32]. In the reviewed literature, the researchers found inconsistent use of terminology and unclear data presentation. The reporting of observational findings often exhibited serious shortcomings. An efficient way to help readers extract the necessary data is to develop guidance documents on data presentation that are disseminated to the research community at large. The researchers need a much more structured framework in scientific reporting, which emphasizes that today’s scientific evidence is based on the synthesis of studies reporting findings with similar effect size measures [33].
The diagnostic sensitivity of the different methods varies greatly regionally, e.g., clinical or laboratory diagnosis, macroscopic or microscopic examination, direct methods to show the infective agent or indirect methods to show its effects (often antibodies) [34]. Metagenomic analysis of environmental samples may also facilitate analysis for unknown infections. The lack of common programs and research method standards complicates result comparison between countries, regions, and times. In this research, the researchers could not do a meta-analysis of the existing studies, since very few papers met the necessary criteria. It is especially important to improve and standardize these methodologies in the future to enhance research.
Harmonization of studies is needed to develop common Arctic protocols to undertake studies on infection in wildlife, e.g., a protocol to measure the prevalence of zoonotic diseases. Good examples are the Trichinella protocols/guidelines of the International Commission on Trichinellosis that can be applied in all Arctic countries [24].

3.3. Involvement of Stakeholders in Surveillance and Risk Assessment

As the Arctic continues to change at a rapid pace, detecting changes in wildlife is paramount. The results of this research indicate the importance of including Russian research when assessing the state of infection research regarding Arctic wildlife. Further studies on surveillance, vaccination, and education for people interacting with wildlife and living in the Arctic will be crucial for mitigating the changes in wildlife infectious diseases associated with globalization and climate change. To provide future valuable data, there is a need to combine the knowledge of Indigenous peoples, citizen scientists, hunters, and governmental agencies.
Wildlife surveillance is important for detecting new diseases and forming risk assessments, which are vital to both human and wildlife populations [25]. The AMAP, the Arctic Monitoring and Assessment Programme, is working on the risk estimation of contaminants in the environment, humans, and wildlife. In the Sustainable Development Working Group (SDWG), there is one important ongoing project—One Arctic, One Health (since 2015) [18]—which exemplifies monitoring, e.g., zoonotic diseases in the circumpolar Arctic.
However, there are still limited surveillance systems or monitoring networks, veterinary care, and knowledge on animal behavior, all of which can pose challenges for assessing wildlife diseases. Establishing new research projects focused on zoonotic diseases, such as CLINF “Climate change effects on the epidemiology of infectious diseases and the impact on Northern societies” are urgent [28][33][34].

References

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Contributors MDPI registered users' name will be linked to their SciProfiles pages. To register with us, please refer to https://encyclopedia.pub/register :
Anastasia Emelyanova
,
Audrey Savolainen
,
Antti Oksanen
,
Pentti Nieminen
,
Olga Loginova
,
Khaled Abass
,
Arja Rautio
View Times: 473
Revisions: 3 times (View History)
Update Date: 29 Sep 2022
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