State Testing Three Foxes to Determine Rabies Strain
UnionLeader.com
06 Aug 2006
Shawne K. Wickham
Public health and wildlife officials are awaiting the results of additional tests on rabid foxes found in Fitzwilliam and Winchester late last month. While the animals already have tested positive for the disease, officials now want to know what strain of the virus infected the foxes. The answer could provide scientists new clues to a disease that is deadly to animals and humans alike.
Since Jan. 1, the state public health lab has tested 12 foxes for rabies and three have tested positive, according to Jason Stull, the state's public health veterinarian at the Department of Health and Human Services.
The rabid animals include a gray fox killed in Fitzwilliam after it attacked a 9-year-old boy and his mother on July 25; a fox found in Winchester, which tested positive on July 28; and a gray fox from Seabrook, tested on March 20.
Reuters Foundation (Posted by AlertNet)
05 Aug 2006
Vietnam's animal health workers have killed 53 wild storks at a theme park in Ho Chi Minh City after random tests showed two of the birds carried an avian influenza virus strain, officials said on Saturday.
An official at the park said the findings of the H5 component, part of the H5N1 poultry virus, led to the slaughter of the birds even though they all appeared healthy.
Wild birds are natural hosts of bird flu viruses and often don't show symptoms but can pass the viruses to poultry. H5N1 can kill chickens within 24 hours of infection. H5N1 is an influenza type-A virus that has killed 42 people in Vietnam since late 2003, but there have been no human infections detected in the Southeast Asian country this year.
Vaccine for Rabies will Fall From Sky: Snacks for Raccoons Aim to Thwart Spread of Deadly Virus
Asheville Citizen-Times (Posted by citizen-times.com)
06 Aug 2006
Clarke Morrison
The raccoon population in several mountain counties will be treated this week to fish-flavored snacks raining down from the sky. It’s not that wildlife managers believe the masked mammals are particularly hungry or are having trouble finding food on their own.
The packets dropped from airplanes contain a vaccine for a virus that’s deadly if left untreated: rabies. The idea is to stop the virus from spreading west of the Appalachians from states along the Eastern Seaboard, where the disease is already widespread.
The aerial distribution of the vaccine-laced bait begins Monday through a program sponsored by the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Wildlife Services Agency in cooperation with the N.C. Division of Public Health. The bait will be dropped in portions of Buncombe, Haywood, Madison, Mitchell, Swain and Yancey counties and the northeast tip of Jackson County.
Volunteers, High-Tech Tools Comb Waters
The News Press (Posted by news-press.com)
06 Aug 2006
Kevin Lollar
In this age of high-tech marine science and ever-vigilant algae hunters, red tide cannot go undetected for long. With resources at work ranging from volunteer water samplers and private science organizations to government agencies and satellites, the red tide organism is under constant surveillance.
“Florida is in a unique situation with red tide,” said Cindy Heil, director of the Florida Fish and Wildlife Research Institute’s Harmful Algal Blooms Group. “Other areas have red tides, but they’re not as frequent, dynamic or complex as ours. We need this kind of collaborative effort because our red tides can be so large and can have such a big effect, whether on animal health or human health.”
Red tide is a natural phenomenon caused by the single-celled alga Karenia brevis, or K. brevis, which produces powerful neurotoxins called brevetoxin.K. brevis is in Gulf water all the time, and under normal conditions — when concentrations of K. brevis cells are less than 1,000 per liter of water — it causes no harm.
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