Wildlife Disease News Digest

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Beached whales drama in S Africa
BBC News - news.bbc.co.uk
30 May 2009
Photo credit: www.timesofmalta.com
Area: Cape Town, Western Cape, South Africa - Map It

South African rescue teams have managed to return to the water 20 false killer whales which beached near Cape Town but others have had to be put down.

Bulldozers were used to try to push the 55 adults and calves back into the water as high winds and waves hampered the rescue operation.

The whales, about 3m (10ft) long, are common to the waters off South Africa.

It is unclear how the mammals became stranded and some which were returned to the water swam back to the beach.

>>>FULL ARTICLE

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Sick, wandering bighorn trailed near Salmon River
KPVI - www.kpvi.com (Source: Associated Press)
31 May 2009
Area: Salmon River Canyon, Idaho, USA - Map It

The hunt is on for a Rocky Mountain bighorn sheep ram believed to be sick with pneumonia.

It's a race wildlife officials say could mean life and death for other members of the wild herd in the Salmon River canyon.

Idaho Fish and Game wildlife managers are trying to kill the ram, to keep it from spreading disease to the roughly 100 other bighorns that live here.

The afflicted bighorn ram was seen near domestic sheep believed to spread fatal diseases and this incident could prove another flashpoint in the contentious debate over how to manage wild sheep and livestock in remote western Idaho.

>>>FULL ARTICLE

Central Africa: Scientists Find More Signs of Bats' Role in Ebola
allAfica.com - allafrica.com (Source: SciDev.Net)
29 May 2009
E Tola And C Scott

Bats spread the Ebola virus to humans and play a pivotal role in disease outbreaks, evidence suggests.

Ebola, a filovirus, causes fever, vomiting, diarrhoea and sometimes bleeding. There is no treatment or vaccine and 25-90 per cent of infected people die. The virus is transmitted by direct contact with infected blood, body fluids and tissues.

The new findings have emerged from data collected in the remote Kasai-Occidental and Kasai provinces of the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) which experienced a large Ebola outbreak in 2007 in which 186 people died.

Some members of the research team helped discover in 2005 that fruit bats are a natural reservoir of the Ebola virus (see Fruit bats blamed for Ebola outbreaks).

>>>FULL ARTICLE

Researchers seek environmental clues to West Nile, SD
Product Design and Development - www.pddnet.com (Source: Associated Press)
31 May 2009
W Ortman

The challenge of trying to predict human risk of West Nile virus each summer will have researchers studying satellite images of South Dakota and Ethiopia.

This ecological forecasting will look for clues in how precipitation, vegetation and temperature might influence mosquito populations and the resulting spread of West Nile Virus in the Northern Plains and malaria in the highlands of Ethiopia.

"The basic idea is that if we can understand something about the environmental relationships, the environmental drivers that are influencing the mosquitoes, the virus, the birds — that is going to allow us to do some sort of forecasting of the particular times and places where the risk of disease transmission is going to be the highest," said Mike Wimberly, an associate professor at South Dakota State University and the principal investigator.

>>>FULL ARTICLE

WILDLIFE HEALTH RELATED NEWS
Photo credit: The Telegraph - www.telegraph.co.uk