Zoonotic Diseases: A New Open Access, Multidisciplinary Journal for Those with Interests in Zoonoses

Last May 2021, we launched a new open access journal called Zoonoses [1] followed by the publication of a Publisher’s Note [2] to introduce it. After careful evaluation, we re-assessed the project in order to distinguish our journal from other available platforms, and have decided to change the journal title to Zoonotic Diseases (ISSN: 2673-9968) [3].

Zoonotic diseases are defined as infections shared in nature between humans and other vertebrate animal species in which those infections are [4]. Zoonoses have been with us, emerging, and evolving for a long time. These mutually transmissible infections likely arose with the development of agriculture and a social structure with more congregated populations that increasingly encountered wildlife along with those species that became domesticated. Today, those relationships and encounters continue with a greater population density and interactions with companion animals, livestock, and wildlife that are combined with lifestyle choices that increasingly result in human encroachment into new and diverse habitats.

The field of zoonotic diseases encompasses the scope of disciplines that impact human and veterinary medicine, biosciences, public health, and environmental sciences. Never timelier than now, zoonotic diseases have a major impact on global public health that will continue to increase as we become more interconnected and our interfaces between animal species are altered or blurred, resulting in increased human interactions with other animal species, pathogens, and arthropod vectors of disease. Zoonotic infections are global threats to health security. The incidence and burden of zoonotic diseases are greater than many realize. A 2012 report estimated that, annually, 2.5 billion human illnesses and 2.7 million deaths are attributable to zoonoses [5]. Zoonoses constitute approximately 60% of the established and 75% of the emerging infectious diseases, with 72% of those emerging zoonoses attributed to wildlife reservoirs, and 23% are arthropod vector-borne diseases [6,7]. The incidence of zoonotic infections is increasing. Lyme borreliosis is a zoonotic infection that is currently estimated to cause 476,000 cases annually in the United States, resulting in an economic impact of potentially USD 1.3 billion [8,9]. Globally, rabies causes an estimated 59,000 human deaths each year, with children being frequent victims [10,11]. The annual global cost of rabies is USD 8.6 billion (WHO, 2021. The true economic and societal impacts attributable to zoonotic diseases remain unknown.

Zoonotic diseases are amenable to One Health integrated approach involving multidisciplinary teams with diverse perspectives that can address the problem at hand. With the spirit of this comprehensive approach in mind, Zoonotic Diseases aims to be a high quality, high impact venue where the full scope of topics relevant to zoonoses and the existing knowledge gaps are addressed. We envision the publication of original research articles, reviews, technique notes, opinion pieces by stakeholders, and manuscripts describing institutional, governmental, and other agency policies, approaches, and strategies to study and control zoonotic diseases. Zoonotic Diseases will be a forum for manuscripts focused on zoonotic bacteria, viruses, parasites, prions, and arthropod vectors, one health and Eco Health, surveillance networks, modelling, disease ecology, epidemiology, the natural nidality of zoonotic diseases, clinical studies, diagnosis, pathogenesis, novel treatment and control measures, and the social determinants of zoonotic diseases.

The Editorial Board and Editorial Office of Zoonotic Diseases look forward to receiving your manuscript submissions and to providing a vibrant forum for publishing your research, reviews, technique notes, discussion articles, and opinion pieces that contribute to our understanding and control of zoonotic diseases. We welcome your input regarding topics and themes that would benefit from a focused consideration. I hope that you will consider Zoonotic Diseases as a venue within which to publish your research. Our goal is to become a responsive and affordable venue for the publication of high-quality, peer reviewed manuscripts from the global zoonotic-diseases-focused scientific community.