EMERGING ZOONOTIC DISEASES AND THEIR IMPACT ON PUBLIC AND ANIMAL HEALTH

Abstract

Zoonotic diseases are a major global health, animal health and economic concern with 75% of emerging infectious diseases coming from animals. This study employed a problem based research design to quantitatively assess the drivers, predictive performance, economic burden, and cost effectiveness of interventions for emerging zoonoses over the period 2000–2025. We applied a multivariate Poisson regression, random forest, gradient boosting, deep neural networks and an ensemble stacked model to outbreak data from 147 countries, environmental, anthropogenic and economic data. Our ensemble model showed the highest accuracy with deforestation and livestock density emerging as important spillover predictors. Economic burden analysis, based on an extended cost of illness framework, revealed that cumulative losses from major zoonotic events exceeded USD 2.5 trillion, with human mortality valuation and livestock losses exhibiting the highest elasticities. The per capita economic loss in low Crucially, enhanced One Health interventions proactive to outbreaks at 10% cost of reactive response averted 61 outbreaks in 10 years with a return on investment of 8.90 and an incremental cost