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. 2022 Dec 7;13:7532. doi: 10.1038/s41467-022-35273-7

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© The Author(s) 2022

Open Access This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons license, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons license and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.

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Fig. 1 — a, b Contact between rodents and humans increases transmission risk; a either with rodents moving into human dwellings and environments or with b, humans moving into rodent habitats or using rodents as a natural resource. c Factors (green boxes) and associated key traits of mechanisms (arrows) explaining increased transmission risk from rodent-borne pathogens. Description of mechanisms: Body mass as a key life history trait can dichotomously increase transmission risk. While rodents with high body mass are frequently hunted for fur or meat, many rodents with low body mass have less developed immune defence strategies and exhibit large population fluctuations (high s-index) resulting in population outbreaks. Periods of high rodent population density are frequently associated with abundant dispersal into human-dominated environments. As pathogens are frequently associated with synanthropic and habitat generalist rodents, these rodents increase transmission risk via proximity to humans. Being a reservoir poses an apparent transmission risk. In the light of many rodent-borne pathogens still being undetected¹⁶, factors like synanthropy, habitat generalism, high population fluctuations and/or high body mass are important predictors of transmission risk.