Wildlife Disease News Digest

Biologists Study West Nile's Effect on Pelicans
The Billings Gazette/ billingsgazette.com
18 May 2007
M Stark
Area: Montana, USA

As mosquitoes bearing West Nile virus begin taking flight again in Montana, health and wildlife officials aren't just worried about people and horses getting sick. In the remote northeast corner of Montana, a few are keeping an eye on a huge colony of American white pelicans. Over the past several years, the virus has chipped away at the youngest members of the population.

Typically, mortality among chicks from mid-July to early September is around 4 percent. West Nile, though, led to the loss of 44 percent of chicks in 2004, 34 percent in 2005 and 8 percent last year, when mosquito activity was relatively low, according to scientists tracking the virus in several white-pelican colonies.

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Scientists: Early Warning System for Disease Needed
SciDev.Net
17 May 2007
M Picard-Aitken

Scientists have called for a "global early warning system" to track infectious diseases that jump from animals to humans, in a paper published in Nature today (17 May). The review identifies huge gaps in our understanding of the origins of major infectious diseases in temperate and tropical countries.

Many of these diseases - HIV/AIDS, malaria, sleeping sickness and dengue fever - are key health concerns in developing countries."The emergence of the major diseases of humanity is not a random process," says Nathan Wolfe, professor of epidemiology at the US-based University of California Los Angeles, who led the research.

"The existence of such patterns suggests that it is possible to move towards an approach that involves forecasting and preventing pandemics rather than waiting for them to spread before trying to control them."

Of the ten tropical diseases studied in the paper, four originated from wild primates. More than half the temperate diseases came from domestic animals.

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Origins of Major Human Infectious Diseases (Nature Article - Abstract Only)

Africa Joins Fight Against Bird Flu
24.com
17 May 2007

Africa now forms part of a global initiative on sharing information on avian influenza – an important step towards making the fight against the virus a priority on this continent. At a press conference in Cape Town on Thursday, it was announced that Sekunjalo Chairman and CEO, Dr Iqbal Survé, has become the first African to form part of the Board of Trustees of the Global Initiative on Sharing Avian Influenza Data (GISAID).

"Dr Survé's leadership skills and ability to network both the private and public sector will be vital in getting Africa to develop measures that are critical in the fight against the spread of the avian influenza virus on the African continent," says Peter Bogner, founder and director of GISAID. In an unprecedented step, 70 scientists from across the globe announced in August 2006 that they were willing to share their data on avian influenza. As a result, GISAID was born.

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Algae Bloom Hits Sanctuary: Large Numbers of Marine Mammals, Birds Affected
Monterey County Herald/ MontereyHerald.com
K Howe
17 May 2007
Photo courtesy of Monterey County Herald
Area: California

Large blooms of algae in Monterey Bay are releasing a toxin that has apparently been poisoning large numbers of marine mammals and birds. Blooms of the algae produce a neurotoxin called domoic acid, said Tim Stephens of the University of California-Santa Cruz, whose scientists report that the blooms which first appeared in Southern California earlier this spring are now occurring along the Central Coast.

Researchers have detected high levels of the toxin in the bay, he said, and large numbers of dead seabirds, as well as sea lions with symptoms of domoic acid poisoning, have been turning up on Monterey Bay beaches. "The impact on marine life depends on how much of the toxin gets into the food web," said Raphael Kudela, associate professor of ocean sciences at UC-Santa Cruz. "But in terms of toxin production and the size of the bloom, this event is similar to the large blooms we saw in Monterey Bay in 2000 and 2002."

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