Biotechnology tools in disease surveillance and monitoring in free ranging wildlife: A review

Abstract

Diseases have become an important challenge, with more than 60% of recent emerging infectious diseases (EIDs) increasingly originating from wildlife due to increasing urbanization, hunting, globalized trade, habitat loss and other environmental changes. This continuous treat of EIDs to biodiversity represents a major crisis and challenge for public health, though there is an international agreement to slow down or halt this menace. Therefore, wildlife disease monitoring and surveillance has been increasing in recent years in an effort to identify and characterize emerging zoonoses. However, traditional monitoring techniques remain problematic due to detection of new disease events, identification of the level and distribution of diseases endemically present in a population, and the invasive nature of some survey techniques. Hence, there is an urgent need for alternative and efficient techniques for large-scale biodiversity monitoring. The disciplines of molecular biology, genomics and evolutionary biology, in particular, are providing insights into the origin of the outbreak, transmissibility, implications and virulence of the pandemic strain. This review therefore, highlights improved free ranging wildlife disease surveillance using biotechnological techniques and highlights genetic tools which could have important socio-economic benefits, including reducing long-term disease management costs, protecting biodiversity and ecosystem services.