Reflections from the president of the International Society of Zoological Sciences: the zoology of zoonotic infectious diseases

摘要

The past 2 years we now have behind us have demonstrated the importance of understanding the dynamics of zoonotic diseases in the wild and how the disease agents spill over to the human population. At the end of 2021, Integrative Zoology published 2 special subsections on this topic, one of which focuses on plague—a zoonotic infectious disease which through history has ravaged the world. Plague, caused by the bacterium Yersinia pestis, continues to cause deaths among people. I am quite confident that we will not get rid of wildlife plague, but human plague epidemics might be history in the not too distant future (Baril et al. 2019; Vallès et al. 2020).