id	author	title	date	pages	extension	mime	words	sentences	flesch	summary	cache	txt
cord-269505-7g8lio9l	Keesing, Felicia	Impacts of biodiversity on the emergence and transmission of infectious diseases	2010-12-01		.txt	text/plain	5349	263	43	For hantavirus pulmonary syndrome, a directly transmitted zoonotic disease, correlational and experimental studies have shown that a lower diversity of small mammals increases the prevalence of hantaviruses in their hosts, thereby increasing risk to humans (Box 2). Diversity has a similar effect for plant diseases, with species losses increasing the transmission of two fungal rust pathogens that infect perennial rye grass and other plant species 10 . This is because field studies like those on West Nile virus, hantaviruses and rye grass have typically not controlled for changes in host density that can result from changes in 'species richness' (the number of species present in a community, which is a measure of taxonomic diversity). In sum, reducing biodiversity can increase disease transmission when the lost species are either not hosts for the pathogen or are suboptimal ones. In several case studies, the species most likely to be lost from ecological communities as diversity declines are those most likely to reduce pathogen transmission.	./cache/cord-269505-7g8lio9l.txt	./txt/cord-269505-7g8lio9l.txt