Wildlife-rich “biodiversity hotspots” in the developing world must be better protected to stop the rise of new infectious diseases that could have a deadly impact on mankind, scientists said yesterday.

Human encroachment on animal habitats could generate infections that will have the same impact as HIV/ Aids, Sars and H5N1 flu, according to a study that identifies conservation as a key element in the fight to contain new germs.

National parks that keep wild animals away from dense human settlements would minimise the chances of bacteria and viruses crossing the species barrier, as happened when HIV and Ebola spread from chimpanzees, the researchers said.

“Our analysis highlights the critical importance of conservation work,” said Kate Jones, of the Zoological Society of London, who led the international team. “Wild places where there is an increasing growth in human density are where there’s an increasing risk of diseases emerging.”

Marc Levy, of Columbia University in New York, said: “We are crowding wildlife into ever smaller areas, and human population is increasing. Where those two things meet, that is a recipe for something crossing over.”

Conservation programmes, as well as improved disease surveillance, must focus on developing countries, the scientists said. The hotspots from which future threats are likely to come are in tropical parts of Africa, Central America and Asia, yet resources devoted to the issue are concentrated on Western Europe and North America.

“The global effort for emerging infectious disease surveillance and investigation is poorly allocated, with the majority of our scientific resources focused on places from where the next important emerging pathogen is least likely to originate,” the researchers write in the journal Nature.

In the study, a team led by Dr Jones examined details of 335 infectious diseases that emerged in humans between 1940 and 2004 to seek clues to their origins and how similar outbreaks might be avoided in future. They found that the rate at which new diseases arise or spread into new regions has quadrupled over the study period. The number peaked in the 1980s, when the advent of HIV/Aids is thought to have made affected people more vulnerable to new pathogens.

About 60.3 per cent of these new infections emerged from animals, and of these 71.8 per cent came from wildlife.

Those that crossed to humans from domestic animals include new-variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (vCJD) in the UK, the human version of “mad cow” disease. Other emerging conditions include drug-resistant infections such as MRSA and tuberculosis, and food-borne ones such as new strains of E. coli and salmonella.

However, new pathogens with the potential to sweep through human populations, such as HIV/Aids, tend to be “zoonotic” diseases that originate with wild animals. The risk from these is greatest in the developing world.

Peter Daszak, of the Wildlife Trust in New York, said: “Our priority should be to set up ‘smart surveillance’ measures in these hotspots. If we continue to ignore this important preventive measure then human populations will continue to be at risk.”

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