Wildlife Disease News Digest

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Cancer Kills Wild Animals Too
LiveScience - www.livescience.com
24 Jun 2009
Photo credit: Cynthia Lagueux

Cancer accounts for about 10 percent of all human deaths. If you think that sets us apart, scientists have news for you: Wild animals die of cancer at about the same rate, and it threatens some species with extinction.

"Cancer is one of the leading health concerns for humans," Dr. Denise McAloose, a pathologist for the Wildlife Conservation Society, said in a statement. "But we now understand that cancer can kill wild animals at similar rates."

McAloose and her colleagues compiled information on cancer in wildlife and concluded that cancer poses a conservation threat to certain species. The team called for greater protection of animals and people through increased health monitoring. They published their research in the July edition of the journal Nature Reviews Cancer.

>>>FULL ARTICLE

Cited Journal Article
>>>Wildlife cancer: a conservation perspective. Nature Reviews Cancer. 2009 July; 9: 517-526.

Reported Wildlife Mortality Events to the USGS National Wildlife Health Center Updated
USGS National Wildlife Health Center
25 Jun 2009
Area: United States

USGS and a network of partners across the country work on documenting wildlife mortality events in order to provide timely and accurate information on locations, species and causes of death. This information was updated on June 22, 20079 on the USGS National Wildlife Health Center web page, New and Ongoing Wildlife Mortality Events Nationwide. Quarterly Mortality Reports are also available from this page. These reports go back to 1995.

>>> Updated Wildlife Mortality Event Table

On Malaria Struggle, Baboons And Humans Have Similar Stories To Tell
ScienceDaily - www.sciencedaily.com (Source: Duke University)
24 Jun 2009
Photo credit: Zina Deretsky, National Science Foundation

Evolutionarily speaking, baboons may be our more distant cousins among primates. But when it comes to our experiences with malaria over the course of time, it seems the stories of our two species have followed very similar plots.

In humans, subtle variation in one particular gene that controls whether a protein on the surface of red blood cells gets made or not literally spells the difference between susceptibility or resistance to one form of malaria. That's because the blood protein serves as the entry point for Plasmodium vivax, one of several malaria-causing parasites that infect humans.

Now, researchers at the Duke Institute for Genome Sciences & Policy report that variation in precisely the same regulatory gene also influences baboons' chances of getting sick, by ratcheting their susceptibility to another, closely related parasite up or down.

>>>FULL ARTICLE

Cited Journal Article
>>>Evolution of a malaria resistance gene in wild primates. Nature. 2009 Jun 24; [Epub ahead of print].

OTHER WILDLIFE HEALTH RELATED NEWS
Photo credit: Summit Daily News