SYSTEMATIC REVIEW article
Front. Vet. Sci.
Sec. Veterinary Humanities and Social Sciences
This article is part of the Research TopicControl of Parasitic ZoonosesView all articles
Public Acceptance of Policy Measures to Combat Infectiously Transmittable Diseases in Pets: A Systematic Literature Review
Provisionally accepted
- KPM Center for Public Management, University of Bern, Bern, Switzerland
Select one of your emails
You have multiple emails registered with Frontiers:
Notify me on publication
Please enter your email address:
If you already have an account, please login
You don't have a Frontiers account ? You can register here
Zoonotic diseases represent a critical and growing threat to global public health. While farm and wild animals are already heavily integrated into policy measures of disease prevention, companion animals do often not get included in the fight against zoonotic diseases, despite their proximity to humans. Nevertheless, policy measures focusing on household pets are a crucial element in the prevention, combat and monitoring of infectiously transmittable diseases. This systematic literature review after PRISMA guidelines summarizes the research on pet-targeted disease prevention measures, focusing on factors influencing their acceptability. Factors influencing acceptance were categorized in an expanded Nodality-Authority-Treasure-Organization-scheme after Hood. Ninety-five articles were included in the study and provide insights across thirty-two countries, with vaccination as the most researched measure and personal owners' characteristics as the most frequently studied factors influencing acceptance. The review found that vaccination was the most frequently studied policy measure while information provided by veterinarians, affordability, organisational accessibility, and pet controllability emerging as the strongest factors influencing public acceptance. Personal and contextual characteristics of owners and pets also played a decisive role, highlighting that successful implementation depends on integrating veterinary, social, and behavioural perspectives. This review highlights that information distribution through veterinarians, affordability, organisation of the measure and controllability of the animal resulted to be the factors most influencing the level of measure acceptance. It is shown that the interplay of policy decisions with factors of context has to be considered in order to accelerate acceptance.
Keywords: Zoonoses, Policy measures, acceptance, Public Health, companion animals
Received: 03 Apr 2025; Accepted: 27 Oct 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 Wyler. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence: Michelle Kim Emily Wyler, michelle.kim.wyler@unibe.ch
Disclaimer: All claims expressed in this article are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of their affiliated organizations, or those of the publisher, the editors and the reviewers. Any product that may be evaluated in this article or claim that may be made by its manufacturer is not guaranteed or endorsed by the publisher.