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Open research questions in Zoonotic diseases and public health

42 unresolved questions extracted from the limitations and future-work sections of 674 Zoonotic diseases and public health papers in our library. Each links back to the study that raised it.

What the literature leaves open

  • Abstract Tick-borne diseases are an increasing challenge for UK livestock farming, yet decision-making processes and risk perceptions surrounding them are not well understood.

    Farmers and veterinarians’ perceptions and adaptive management of tick-borne disease risk on endemic dairy farms · 2026 · DOI

  • Although a strand of scholarship on pandemic prevention flourished in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, a theoretically informed empirical analysis of global governance entrepreneurs and practitioner perspectives is lacking.

    Global governance of pandemic prevention from the wildlife trade: A perspective from governance entrepreneurs and practitioners · 2026 · DOI

  • beneficiaries or • Epidemiological estimates for rabies and snakebite mortality in India vary widely across sources due to surveillance under- coverage; this uncertainty limits precision in burden quantification.

    Zoo-WIN: Bridging Surveillance, Supply Chains, and One Health for Zoonotic Disease Control in India · 2026 · DOI

  • The literature on which it is based is limited by the biases of surveillance, publication, and funding of the research itself, as well as disproportionate information about some areas and pathogens. Remote sensing and secondary outbreak data are important to hotspot analyses and deforestation-spillover studies, as they might misidentify exposure routes and represent underreported spillover occurrences (Rulli et al.

    Reframing Zoonotic Spillover: Deforestation, Biodiversity Loss, and Climate Change as Molecular Epidemiological Risk Multipliers · 2026 · DOI

  • Socio-ecological and behavioural risk factors for CCHFV exposure in Uganda remain poorly understood, which can lead to the omission of key risk factors in quantitative survey design and limit our wider understanding.

    Crimean-Congo haemorrhagic fever virus transmission: exploring perceptions of human-animal-tick interactions across six districts in Uganda · 2026 · DOI

  • Co-design methodologies involving communities, health workers, and policymakers for developing culturally relevant and operationally feasible AI tools for One Health infectious disease applications in SSA contexts have not been documented in the literature.

    The use of artificial intelligence based modelling techniques in One Health-related infectious disease studies in Sub-Saharan Africa: a review · 2026 · DOI

  • Multidisciplinary training programs combining epidemiologists, veterinarians, public health experts, and data scientists specifically designed for AI-based One Health disease modelling in SSA contexts do not yet exist; local AI expertise development pathways remain undefined.

    The use of artificial intelligence based modelling techniques in One Health-related infectious disease studies in Sub-Saharan Africa: a review · 2026 · DOI

  • AI applications in infectious disease research across SSA are geographically concentrated in countries with stronger research ecosystems; large portions of West and Central Africa are absent from AI-related One Health scholarship and require targeted model development and deployment.

    The use of artificial intelligence based modelling techniques in One Health-related infectious disease studies in Sub-Saharan Africa: a review · 2026 · DOI

  • Integration of animal and environmental data into AI-based infectious disease models in One Health frameworks remains severely limited; specific protocols for combining human epidemiological data with veterinary and ecological datasets in SSA contexts have not been developed.

    The use of artificial intelligence based modelling techniques in One Health-related infectious disease studies in Sub-Saharan Africa: a review · 2026 · DOI

  • AI-based One Health infectious disease models in Sub-Saharan Africa currently lack systematic validation using external datasets from independent geographic regions within SSA; cross-validation and sensitivity analyses across West and Central African contexts remain largely absent from the literature.

    The use of artificial intelligence based modelling techniques in One Health-related infectious disease studies in Sub-Saharan Africa: a review · 2026 · DOI

  • • Farmers must adopt safer livestock management practices by iso- lating sick animals, improving biosecurity, and avoiding the con- sumption of raw animal products. • Farmers must actively participate in training and awareness pro- grammes to strengthen knowledge of zoonotic risks and prevention. • Municipalities must invest in safe water sources, waste manage- ment, and sanitation infrastructure to reduce environmental exposure to pathogens. • Government departments must expand veterinary surveillance, diagnostic testing, and mobile clinic services in underserved rural communities. • Government departments must strengthen interdepartmental col- laboration through a One Health approach that links animal health, human health, and environmental management.

    Prevalence and risk factors of zoonotic diseases on the human-wildlife-livestock interface in eastern cape and KwaZulu-Natal provinces, South Africa · 2026 · DOI

  • Shedding light on this understudied topic in the fields of the history of medicine and of the People's Republic of China (PRC), the author argues that it was not the central or provincial governments but rather local communes that led the effort to protect livestock from animal infectious diseases.

    Rabbit Spleen and Medicinal Herbs: Animal Infectious Diseases, Grassroots Communes, and the State in Maoist China · 2024 · DOI

  • Food- borne exposure is normally limited to the consumption of unpasteurised milk and dairy products or undercooked contaminated meat from countries where brucellosis is endemic in animals. 6%) than in other animals sampled but their population sizes and distributions in Europe are generally limited to a few countries. 2%) were limited to a few countries (Belgium, France, Netherlands, Poland and Spain).

    The European Union One Health 2023 Zoonoses report · 2024 · DOI

  • A hypothesis is that the most significant underrecognized problem associated with COVID-19 is disinformation and the weakening of confidence in institutions, including governments, and how adversaries may exploit that blind spot.

    How COVID-19 is reshaping U.S. national security policy · 2023 · DOI

  • Despite all the efforts done to understand the mechanism of spread, presence and maintenance of ASF in domestic pigs and wild boar, there are still many gaps in the knowledge on its epidemiology.

    Spatio-Temporal Analysis of the Spread of ASF in the Russian Federation in 2017-2019 · 2020 · DOI

  • In South Africa, for example, death rates are seven times lower than those in the UK and infections (even if under-reported) are bafflingly low, leading experts to speculate that the very conditions thought to fuel a massive outbreak – poverty and crowded living – may be protective, having enabled widespread exposure to earlier coronaviruses that confer some immunity (Harding, 2020).

    Grand Challenges, Covid‐19 and the Future of Organizational Scholarship · 2020 · DOI

  • Emerging at a time when germ theory was poorly understood and denied by many, and in light of multiple livestock diseases, including contagious bovine pleuro-pneumonia (CBPP), hog cholera, bovine tuberculosis, Texas fever, trichinosis, and foot-and-mouth disease, the BAI was “a landmark in the history of [End Page 821] federal regulation” (p.

    Arresting Contagion: Science, Policy, and Conflicts over Animal Disease Control by Alan L. Olsmstead and Paul W. Rhode (review) · 2015 · DOI

  • The paper mentions comparative psychology, behaviourism, and ethology as fields demonstrating interdependence of human and animal mental interiority but does not specify which historical case studies, theoretical debates, or institutional developments within these disciplines should be examined to understand how medical knowledge about species difference was co-constituted through psychological and behavioral research.

    Medicine and Species: One Medicine, One History? · 2012 · DOI

  • The blood transfusion case study (docile sheep blood given to a manic Cambridge student) exemplifies interspecies medical intervention, but the paper does not systematically investigate what medical sources, case records, or institutional archives document similar cross-species therapeutic interventions and how species-based medical rationales changed from early modern to modern periods.

    Medicine and Species: One Medicine, One History? · 2012 · DOI

  • The paper invokes Haraway's concept of 'situated histories, situated nature-cultures' but does not operationalize this framework concretely for historical medicine scholarship. Historians of medicine need explicit methodological guidance on how to apply this relational ontology to specific archival sources, medical texts, and clinical practices to avoid essentializing either human or animal categories.

    Medicine and Species: One Medicine, One History? · 2012 · DOI

  • The authors gesture toward examining skin grafting, organ transplantation, and xenotransplantation as instances of interspecies medical encounter, but provide no systematic historical analysis of how species demarcation categories were constructed and reconstructed within these specific surgical and transplantation practices across the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

    Medicine and Species: One Medicine, One History? · 2012 · DOI

  • The paper identifies that medicine functions as a site of interspecies interaction but admits 'such an agenda raises difficulties of analytic terminology.' Future work must develop specific conceptual frameworks and standardized terminology for analyzing how medical discourses become 'specied' across historical periods, parallel to how prior scholarship revealed gendered medical discourses.

    Medicine and Species: One Medicine, One History? · 2012 · DOI

  • Systems-based research examining how food production impacts on AMR in complex agrifood systems is lacking, with little written on management approaches in the UK that might prevent and respond to this challenge.

    Diagnostic analgesia of the equine forefoot · 2004 · DOI

  • Introduction Brucellosis is a neglected zoonotic disease of major public health importance in Côte d'Ivoire, where it remains underrecognized in the human health sector despite prioritization under the Global Health Security Agenda.

    Breaking professional silos to combat brucellosis: a pilot feasibility and proof-of-concept study of interprofessional education to strengthen healthcare capacity in Côte d'Ivoire · 2026 · DOI

  • These findings highlight the urgent need to decentralize research and reorient Peru’s health science agenda toward critical, under-studied disciplines.

    A Bibliometric Analysis of Microbiology and Parasitology Research Indexed in SciELO Peru, 2000–2023 · 2026 · DOI

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42 open questions have been extracted from the limitations and future-work passages of 674 Zoonotic diseases and public health papers in our library. Each one below links back to the study that raised it, so you can read the original claim in context.

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