Dear Alliance Members,
We are pleased to invite you to our next Alliance Expert Talk – Webinar on Wednesday, June 10th, 2026, at 16:00 hrs CEST time, hosted by the International Alliance against Health Risks in Wildlife Trade.
In this talk, Dr Jérôme Gippet will present insights from a recent Science article on how wildlife trade has shaped animal-to-human pathogen transmission over 40 years.
This event will be held in English, with simultaneous interpretation in French and Spanish.
Don’t miss this opportunity to learn, engage, and ask your questions directly to the Expert!
About the event:
Global wildlife trade brings wild animals and humans into close and repeated contact across harvesting, transport, markets, consumption, and captivity. These interactions create opportunities for pathogens to move between species and can contribute to the emergence of infectious diseases.
Dr Jérôme Gippet and co-authors combined global wildlife trade records with host–pathogen association data to examine how wildlife trade has influenced animal-to-human pathogen transmission.
Their findings show that traded wild animals, particularly mammals, are more likely to share pathogens with humans — and that risk grows with the length of time a species has been traded. Live-animal and illegal trade further increase this risk, highlighting wildlife trade as a significant driver of zoonotic risk.
What does this mean for public health, animal health, and wildlife trade regulations? Join us to find out.
About the Speakers:
Jérôme Gippet
Jérôme Gippet is a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Fribourg, Switzerland. His research explores human–wildlife interactions from both applied and fundamental perspectives in ecology and conservation. Trained as an invasion biologist and urban ecologist at the University of Lyon, he later worked as a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Lausanne, where he investigated emerging exotic pet markets in invertebrates. This work revealed a previously overlooked global trade in pet ants, highlighting important risks for biological invasions (Gippet & Bertelsmeier 2021, PNAS). His research is strongly data-driven and often draws on unconventional sources, such as online pet shops and social media, to better understand wildlife markets and their consequences for biodiversity, invasion dynamics, and pathogen transmission.
About the Alliance’s Expert talk series:
The International Alliance against Health Risks in Wildlife Trade is a global, interdisciplinary network of over 180 organisations and more than 500 experts working to prevent pathogen spillover by bridging science, policy and practice.
The Alliance envisions is to act as an incubator for generating and sharing knowledge across its network and beyond. The Expert Talk series has been designed to support this aim by enabling members and invited experts to share relevant insights and evidence-based knowledge with the community.
If you would like to present your work, please reach out to us at alliance-wildlife-health@woah.org