Bridge hosts, a missing link for disease ecology in multi-host systems

Table 2 Evaluation of available epidemiological and ecological methods to identify bridge species for AIV according to their contributions to informing about host competence or contacts, as well as their relative costs (i.e. time and resources)

	Host competence			Host contacts		Resources	Examples for AIV
Method	Receptivity	Replication	Excretion	Contact/Maintenance	Contact/Target
Experimental Infection	xxx	xxx	xxx			xxx	[32-35]
Risk Analysis				x	x	x	[41-43]
Serological investigation	x	x		x		xx	[27,28,30]
Virological investigation	xx	xx	xx	xx		xx	[19,23,24,26,29,31,37]
Telemetry study				xxx	xxx	xxx	[39]
Bird ringing and monitoring				xx	x	x	[40]
Bird counts				xx	xx	x	[8,23,26,41]
Molecular epidemiology	xx	xx	xx	xx	xx	xxx	[48,49]

As the number of crosses increases in the first 2 columns the methods provide better ecological or epidemiological information; in the last columns, cost increases as the number of crosses increases.

ISSN: 1297-9716