Expansion of world’s cities creating ‘new ecological niches’ for infectious diseases

New research highlights how urban expansion is creating the conditions for infectious diseases to emerge and spread around the world by blurring the classical boundaries between city, suburb, and countryside. An interdisciplinary team of researchers from the University of Lincoln, UK, and York University, Canada, investigated how the global trend towards urbanisation has contributed to the rise in the total number of disease outbreaks per decade since the 1980s. Their study, a major literature review published in the academic journal Urban Studies, shows that urban expansion at the periphery of cities – sometimes called ‘extended urbanisation’- is fundamentally altering the spatial relationships which shape how millions of people live and interact with each other and with nature. In doing so, it is creating ´new ecological niches’ for the spread of infectious diseases, the researchers warn. Rapid urbanisation, particularly in developing nations of Asia and Africa, is creating fluid relationships between urban and rural...