Wildlife Disease News Digest

TOP STORIES

Smaller deer herds await Minnesota hunters
Pioneer Press - www.twincities.com
19 Oct 2009
C Niskanen

Minnesota is no longer a state with big deer problems.

After years of aggressive hunting regulations and a recent moderately severe winter, much of Minnesota's deer herd has shrunk to manageable levels, Department of Natural Resources officials said Monday.

. . . In northwest Minnesota, the threat of the spread of bovine tuberculosis from deer to cattle has kept deer hunting regulations as liberal as possible again this year. Hunters will be allowed a limit of five deer and sharpshooters will be employed to kill deer in a zone around the town of Skime, the epicenter of disease outbreak.

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Another ibex dies

Daily Times - www.dailytimes.com.pk
17 Oct 2009
A Guriro
Photo courtesy of the Daily Times

Location: Khirthar National Park, Sind, Pakistan - Map It

Another Sindh ibex has died in the Khirthar National Park following the recent wave of a viral disease in some of the herds, bringing the death toll of dead ibexes to 48.

Experts have termed it as a disaster that has gripped the protected park for the first time in its history.

The officials of the Sindh Wildlife Department have taken the samples from the dead animals with the help of veterinary experts of the Sindh Agricultural University Tandojam and sent them to the University of Veterinary and Animal Sciences, Lahore so that the actual reason of the deaths could be ascertained.

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Ivory Coast: H5N1-infected birds reported
World Poultry - www.worldpoultry.net
20 Oct 2009

Location: Cocody, Abidjan, Cote d'Ivoire - Map It

Agricultural authorities in the Ivory Coast report that 30 wild white-necked ravens have been found dead and 9 tested positive on the highly pathogenic avian influenza virus H5N1.

The birds died suddenly while they were flying over the secondary school located at Cocody in Abidjan.

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Catching a killer one spore at a time
Eurekalert - www.eurekalert.org
19 Oct 2009
Photo courtesy of Save the Frogs!

A workshop at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute in Panama has dramatically improved the ability of conservationists and regulatory agencies to monitor the spread of chytridiomycosis—one of the deadliest frog diseases on Earth.

. . . "The fungus spreads so rapidly because humans ship nearly 100 million amphibians around the world each year, mainly for food and pets, with virtually no disease testing," said Kerry Kriger, executive director of the U.S. non-profit, Save The Frogs! and course instructor with Sandra Victoria Flechas from Universidad de los Andes in Colombia.

. . . "We've probably just doubled the number of people in the world who know how to use this method to detect the pathogen," said Kriger. "The beauty of PCR is that you don't have to kill the frog or take a skin sample to test for the disease."

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