Environmental microplastics as vectors for avian virus transmission and their implications for food safety within a one health framework

Environmental microplastics have become ubiquitous pollutants, which can also react not only to chemical pollution but also to biological agents, such as viruses. Simultaneously, avian viral diseases remain a major health hazard to livestock, food safety, and human health, especially in intensive management poultry, and at wildlife-livestock interface. In this paper, the authors discuss the emerging hypothesis, which posits the possibility that environmental microplastics serve as vectors or facilitators of the spread of avian viruses, has downstream implications on food safety, and is viewed in the context of One Health perspective. The study analyses how the physical and chemical characteristics of microplastics facilitate the viral attaching, persistence, and transportation across the environmental compartments through the synthesis of evidence based on environmental science, virology, disease ecology, and food safety research. The paper also assesses the possible exposure routes of polluted environments to avian hosts and food supply chain to human beings. The topic of finding critical knowledge gaps, methodological hurdles, and or regulatory blind spots that restrain existing risk assessment and surveillance initiatives is accentuated. Placing microplastics as new modifiers of disease ecology, this study suggests integrated and cross-sectoral research, monitoring, and policy-making. Finally, the paper aims to make a more comprehensive contribution to the comprehension of environmental drivers that affect the transmission of the virus and to inform the One Health-focused measures that can protect the health of animals, food, and people in an environment of increasing levels of plastic pollution.