Animal Diseases as Warnings
The Washington Post
2006 May 24
D'Vera Cohn
Photo coutsety of washingtonpost.com

A growing number of scientists and government agencies are engaged in projects to track outbreaks of animal disease that could give a warning of a bioterrorism attack, modeled on the proverbial canary that coal miners carried to alert them to poisons in the air.

They include officials at the Wildlife Center of Virginia in Waynesboro, who announced this week that they received an Air Force grant to design a national bioterrorism surveillance network that would link data from two dozen North American wildlife hospitals. The center's president, Ed Clark, said it would be "the bird dog out in front trying to get a whiff of what's going on."

A simple example, he said, would be that ducks dying at a reservoir could signal an attempt to poison the water supply.

Other efforts include a new surveillance program to collect daily information from commercial pet hospitals, the recent establishment of a federal "wildlife disease data warehouse" to swap information and the work of the Canary Database at Yale University, which has assembled thousands of scientific articles on links between wildlife and human health.

>>>FULL ARTICE

Sea Life Suggests Hawai'i is Not So Isolated After All
The Honolulu Advertiser
2006 May 23
Jan TenBruggencate
Photo courtsey of The Honolulu Advertiser

NIHOA, Northwestern Ha-waiian Islands — Scientists aboard the research ship Hi'ialakai are finding that Hawai'i's isolation may not be as complete as others have thought.

There are biological connections — the existence in these Islands of corals from the South Pacific, fishes from Japan — that may once have seemed impossible. Solving that puzzle is one of the missions of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration ship on its 25-day mission to Nihoa, French Frigate Shoals and Gardner Pinnacles in the Northwest Hawaiian Islands, and remote Johnston Atoll, 500 miles to the south.

Marine ecologist Scott Godwin is fascinated with a golden-brown crab with blue spots that lives inside table corals and can't live anywhere else. It, and the table corals it lives on, are found on several of the Northwestern Hawaiian Islands, and also on Johnston Atoll.

>>>FULL ARTICLE

Wildlife Center to Develop Bioterrorism Surveillance Network
The Associated Press (hosted by dailypress.com)
2006 May 22

WAYNESBORO, Va. -- The Wildlife Center of Virginia is developing a national surveillance network that would help detect diseases in wildlife that may be linked to bioterrorism.

While there are already systems designed to detect diseases in humans and domestic animals, Project Tripwire would be the first comprehensive effort to monitor wildlife for signs of bioterrorism, Wildlife Center President Ed Clark said Monday.

"Terrorism is not just killing people," Clark said. "Bioterrorism could be something as simple as introducing a disease to a (herd) of cows."

The Center entered into a $166,000, six-month contract with the Institute for Defense and Homeland Security last month to work on planning for a database, which will initially link 20 to 25 of North America's largest wildlife hospitals.

>>>FULL ARTICLE