Imported Pets are Disease Hunter’s Prey
The Associated Press (Posted by Times-Leader.com)
5 Dec 2006
M Ebrahim
His quest is to prove that African rodents caused a monkeypox outbreak in the Midwest in 2003
As the rising sun danced across Florida’s coastal waters, government workers in shorts and T-shirts knelt in a grassy island field and plucked wriggling rats from traps laid the night before. These weren’t just any rats. They were 3-pound, 35-inch-long African behemoths. They squirmed as the workers, wearing protective gloves, removed green radio collars that had been tracking the rodents’ movements.
All 18 of the animals were carted away for research. Darin Carroll kept a watchful eye on that dawn mission at Florida’s Grassy Key Island. Carroll is no ordinary G-man. He’s a disease hunter determined to stop the next outbreak. Carroll works for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and for three years he has painstakingly tracked the journey of Gambian rats from their African homeland, through the exotic pet trade, and to U.S. homes.
New Approach To Mad Cow Disease Successful In Lab: Prion-infected Mice Survive Longer
Science Daily
4 Dec 2006
A new method of treatment can appreciably slow down the progress of the fatal brain disease scrapie in mice. This has been established by researchers from the Universities of Munich and Bonn together with their colleagues at the Max Planck Institute in Martinsried. To do this they used an effect discovered by the US researchers Craig Mello and Andrew Fire, for which they were awarded this year's Nobel Prize for Medicine.
Scrapie is a variant of the cattle disease BSE (bovine spongiform encephalopathy, also known as 'mad cow disease') and the human equivalent Creutzfeld-Jakob disease. However, it will take years for the method to be introduced to medicine, the researchers warn. Their findings are published in the next issue of the Journal of Clinical Investigation (Vol. 116, No. 12, December 2006).
New Lab to Enhance Animal and Human Health Protection
Lab Canada.com
20 Nov 2006
Construction will begin next month on a high-tech lab that will allow the British Columbia to respond faster and more efficiently to animal disease incidents. The Containment Level 3 (CL3) lab, to be built by Vanbots Construction, will be an addition to the existing Animal Health Centre in Abbotsford and will allow for bacterial and viral testing.
Construction of the $14.5-million facility is anticipated to begin in mid-December and the lab is expected to be ready for operation by late 2007. Before it becomes operational, it will be tested and commissioned by the Canadian Food Inspection Agency.
Scientists Criticize Bird Flu Search
The Associated Press (Posted by Physorg.com)
5 Dec 2006
Photo Courtesy of Associated Press
Birds from Latin America - not from the north - are most likely to bring deadly bird flu to the main U.S., researchers said Monday, suggesting the government might miss the H5N1 virus because biologists have been looking in the wrong direction.The United States' $29 million bird flu surveillance program has focused heavily on migratory birds flying from Asia to Alaska, where researchers this year collected tens of thousands of samples from wild birds nesting on frozen tundra before making their way south.
Those birds present a much lower risk than migratory birds that make their way north from South America through Central America and Mexico, where controls on imported poultry are not as tough as in the U.S. and Canada, according to findings in the latest Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Nations south of the U.S. import hundreds of thousands of chickens a year from countries where bird flu has turned up in migratory birds or poultry, said A. Marm Kilpatrick, lead author of the study.
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