Toxin Holds Lagoon in Dangerous Grasp
Florida Today
11 Oct 2006
Jim Waymer
Photo Courtesy of Florida Today

A toxin that has sickened 28 people who ate puffer fish since 2002 has spread south from the northern Indian River Lagoon into shellfish and other marine life. Scientists aren't sure why or whether it could contaminate other sea life in the lagoon.

They know only that the poison, called saxitoxin, emerged in the lagoon four years ago and is here to stay. Funding for more research is needed to figure out why.
Scientists believe it spreads through an algae species that has been around for decades but, for unknown reasons, is blooming in much higher concentrations.

"We're starting to see a spread in the way of bloom activity and toxicity," Jan Landsberg, a biologist with the Fish and Wildlife Research Institute, told a group of about 30 scientists and government officials Tuesday in Palm Bay. "Saxitoxin's killed people," Landsberg added. "This is a nasty toxin."

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FWP Investigates Coot Deaths on Georgetown Lake
The Associated Press (Posted by Great Falls Tribune online)
11 Oct 2006

The Montana Department of Fish, Wildlife and Parks is investigating the deaths of several hundred coots at Georgetown Lake west of here. FWP officials say it’s too soon to say what killed the aquatic birds, but the deaths are similar to a 1997 kill that was blamed in part on parasites.

The agency received a report of dead birds at the lake on Sept. 29, said Rose Jaffe, avian influenza surveillance project coordinator in Bozeman. Last week, Jaffe removed 266 coot carcasses from the lake. Another nine were out of reach, she said, and more have since accumulated along the shoreline.

The dead birds Jaffe collected were sent to the National Wildlife Health Center Lab in Wisconsin for examination. The results are expected in about two weeks, she said.
It appears that whatever malady caused the deaths may not have affected other birds, Jaffe said.

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Young Fish Face Deadly Hitchhikers
ScienceNOW Daily News
3 October 2006
Rhitu Chatterjee
Photo Courtesy of Photo Researchers, Inc.

Salmon farming practices have come under fire for polluting oceans and damaging marine ecosystems. Now a new study heaps more criticism on the farms, suggesting that parasitic sea lice that flourish in salmon farms can kill as many as 95% of migrating wild Pacific salmon.

The study, the first that attempts to quantify the effect of sea lice infection on wild Pacific salmon populations, further fuels an ongoing controversy over salmon farming practices in the United States and Canada. Pacific salmon spawn in fresh waters, and the juveniles migrate seaward when they are still small and vulnerable to infection.

Last year, John Volpe, a marine ecologist at the University of Victoria in British Columbia, Canada, and his colleagues showed that two common species of salmon--juvenile pink salmon and chum salmon--became heavily infected with the sea lice Leophtheirus salmonis when they passed a salmon farm off the coast of British Columbia (ScienceNOW, 30 March 2005).

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China's Rabies Cases Surge 30% in First Nine Months (Update1)
Bloomberg.com
11 Oct 2006
Lee Spears

Rabies topped a list of China's deadliest infectious diseases in September and the number of cases rose 30 percent in the first nine months of this year, the Ministry of Health said. Rabies, which attacks the nervous system and is spread through bites from sick animals, killed 318 people in China last month, the ministry said in a statement on its Web site late yesterday.

There were 2,254 infections reported between January and September, it said. It didn't quantify fatalities during that period or provide comparative figures. Stray dogs are being culled in parts of China to stem the spread of the fatal disease, which killed more people than tuberculosis or AIDS in September, according to the ministry's tally of so-called class-A and class-B infectious diseases.

``If the Chinese government wants to eradicate rabies, it's probably the easiest thing in the world for them to do'' through controlling stray dogs, said Adrian Sleigh, a professor at the National Centre for Epidemiology and Population Health at the Australian National University in Canberra.

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Culling and Cattle Controls Influence Tuberculosis Risk for Badgers [Journal Article]
PNAS
2 Oct 2006
Woodroffe et.al.

Human and livestock diseases can be difficult to control where infection persists in wildlife populations. In Britain, European badgers (Meles meles) are implicated in transmitting Mycobacterium bovis, the causative agent of bovine tuberculosis (TB), to cattle. Badger culling has therefore been a component of British TB control policy for many years.

However, large-scale field trials have recently shown that badger culling has the capacity to cause both increases and decreases in cattle TB incidence. Here, we show that repeated badger culling in the same area is associated with increasing prevalence of M. bovis infection in badgers, especially where landscape features allow badgers from neighboring land to recolonize culled areas.

This impact on prevalence in badgers might reduce the beneficial effects of culling on cattle TB incidence, and could contribute to the detrimental effects that have been observed. Additionally, we show that suspension of cattle TB controls during a nationwide epidemic of foot and mouth disease, which substantially delayed removal of TB-affected cattle, was associated with a widespread increase in the prevalence of M. bovis infection in badgers.

This pattern suggests that infection may be transmitted from cattle to badgers, as well as vice versa. Clearly, disease control measures aimed at either host species may have unintended consequences for transmission, both within and between species. Our findings highlight the need for policymakers to consider multiple transmission routes when managing multihost pathogens.

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Experts Hope Shorter Gun Season Will Help Curb CWD Spread
Wisconsin Ag Connection
11 Oct 2006
Photo Courtesy of Wisconsin Ag Connection

Wildlife officials and researchers at the University of Wisconsin-Madison are closely watching for results of new control strategies designed to contain Chronic Wasting Disease in the state's whitetail deer herd. According to the Department of Natural Resources, the largest change from last year is the compression of the white-tailed gun deer season.

By shortening the season to a more traditional Thanksgiving-week hunt, the DNR hopes to control the fatal illness, while increasing hunter satisfaction. Part of the thinking is that the shorter season will make the deer more vulnerable, according to Scott Craven, chairman of the wildlife ecology department in the UW-Madison College of Agricultural and Life Sciences.

Wildlife specialists also hope it will minimize competition for hunters' time from other activities, such as other recreational endeavors, family holiday gatherings and football. "We'll have to find out how these changes in regulations affect the population of deer," says Michael Samuels, a wildlife ecologist at UW-Madison and the Assistant Leader of the USGS-Wisconsin Cooperative Wildlife Research Unit.

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