Two more British Columbia farms affected by avian flu outbreak

Jane Deacon in the Toronto Sun via the QMI Agency: Two more Fraser Valley, B.C., poultry farms have been hit by the avian flu outbreak, bringing the total number of affected birds to 155,000.

Despite efforts to reduce the spread of the disease, health officials say more farms could be affected in the days ahead. There are now seven farms affected.

"Since this is highly contagious and can spread rapidly, we might see more at-risk farms come up," said Dr. Harpreet Kochhar, chief veterinary officer with the Canadian Food Inspection Agency (CFIA).

Eight countries, including the U.S., have temporarily closed their borders to B.C. and Canadian poultry products since the virus was confirmed last week...

A microscopic view of H5N1, from the US Centers for Disease Control

Global animal health threatened by vector born diseases

Companies and Markets: The International Federation for Animal Health has launched a white paper on vector borne diseases and their impact on animal and human health, with the support of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. The paper, which aims to assist in combating vector borne diseases to promote the better health and welfare of animals for the greater good of protecting animals and humans globally, emphasises the need to understand the diseases and to spread awareness of the most effective ways of managing and preventing them.

Vector borne diseases account for 17% of global infectious diseases with malaria the most deadly, causing an estimated 627,000 deaths annually. VBDs cause high human morbidity levels as well as large economic losses in animal production - trypanosomiasis accounts for losses of $1.2 billion a year in cattle production - and reduced animal welfare. Most statistics regarding the impact of VBDs are hard to track because cases predominantly occur in countries with little means of formal reporting or surveillance, poor diagnostic tools and consequently there is little accurate assessment of the economic impact of these diseases. The IFAH's paper looks to close the gaps in knowledge of VBDs and present solutions for combating the problem.

Global animal health is set to be impacted for years to come as the IFAH reports the difficulties in combating diseases that are constantly changing, affected by climate change which influences vector spread and habitat change by humans introducing wetlands or changing their patters of the transportation of goods, humans, livestock, and companion animals. The most influential and dangerous factor limiting the prevention of vector borne disease is insecticide resistance and farmers must be aware of the need to manage the spread of VBDs through a combination of insecticides and physical barriers....

Edward Hicks' 1848 painting, "The Cornell Farm"

Poland suffers first cases of African swine fever in pigs

Terra Daily via AFP: Poland on Wednesday confirmed its first cases of deadly swine fever in domestic pigs, as the World Trade Organisation reviewed a Russian embargo on EU pork imports imposed over the disease. "Test results showed the first outbreak of African swine fever on a farm with five pigs," in the eastern region of Bialystok bordering Belarus, Polish veterinary authorities said in a statement.

The animals were destroyed and 37 surrounding farms with 192 pigs were put under quarantine, it added. The development comes the day after fellow EU member Latvia declared a state of emergency in a second area of the Baltic state as efforts continued to contain an outbreak of the fever among pigs.

Lithuania ordered a mass cull of wild boar earlier this year, targeting 90 percent of the estimated 60,000 living on its territory, after the disease was detected in animals thought to have come from Belarus. Poland first imposed measures in February to safeguard its lucrative pork exports, worth 912 million euros ($1.2 billion) last year, after the disease was found in two wild boar....

Jatki (Old Abattoir alley) - "In Memory of Slaughter Animals" memorial. Shot by Julo, public domain

Animal disease spread spells bad news for human health

Annie Hauser at Weather.com: Sea otters off of Alaska's Aleutian Islands might be the latest victims of climate change's effect on the spread of disease.  In the past 10 years, the population has plummeted 70 percent — thanks to phocine distemper virus, a disease once never found in the North Pacific, Christopher Solomon recently wrote for Scientific American.

Researchers believe the Arctic's melting polar icebox is to blame for this virus's travel. "Their theory is that it has made its way through the fabled Northwest passage via a seal or its feces and met animals on the other side due to the dramatic level of sea ice reduction," Solomon explained to NPR.

 Musk oxen are another dramatic example of an animal dying thanks to the changing climate, in this case because of a fatal lung disease that was once unable to survive in the frigid Arctic temperatures, a team of international researchers wrote in a Science special issue on climate change last year.

The spread of disease among animals poses a huge threat to human health. As Solomon explained to NPR: "Since 1940, 60 percent of the new infectious diseases we've discovered in humans have come from animals. We've knocked down the borders between the natural world and the man-made world. Or, in these cases, the borders are simply melting away … As one parasitologist Michael Grigg at the National Institutes of Health told me, he said, 'if the animals get sick, we can get sick.'"

The warming globe's impact on vector-borne diseases has recently been acutely felt in the United States. In Florida, the first locally acquired case of the deadly, mosquito-borne chikungunya virus appeared last week. Rates of all vector-borne diseases, such as the most common, Lyme disease, have been increasing in recent years with experts fingering climate change as the culprit...

A sea otter in Morro Bay, shot by Mike Baird, Wikimedia Commons via Flickr, under the Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license

Researchers use “big data” to track zoonotic diseases

John Maday in Dairy Herd Management: About 60 percent of diseases are zoonotic, or can pass between humans and various animal species, and understanding the pathways and complex relationships between pathogens, hosts and environmental factors is key to improving control strategies.

To untangle some of those relationships, researchers at the University of Liverpool in England are developing the Enhanced Infectious Diseases (EID2) database with funding from the Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council (BBSRC).

According to an article from the BBSRC, the researchers realized there was a vast amount of disease data available in scientific literature and pre-existing databases. They decided to use a “big data” approach, utilizing advanced computer technology to mine and aggregate data for application in disease modeling.

Using this approach, the researchers have built a database team member and epidemiologist Dr. Marie McIntyre, says is “matchless in scale, and has the capacity to hold data on all known human and animal pathogens, when detailed information becomes available." The database has been used in efforts to trace the history of human and animal diseases, predict the
effects of climate change on pathogens, produce maps of which diseases are most likely in some areas and categorize the complex relationships between human and animal carriers and hosts of numerous pathogens. The database is open-access for registered researchers, who can manipulate and organize the data to suit their research goals....

A diary herd in Bodalla, Australia, from the Powerhouse Museum

Climate change adaptation tool helps predict disease risk

The Poultry Site: A tool to calculate the risk of food and waterborne diseases under current or future climate change conditions has been established following a recent EU funded study. Free to use, the online tool can help guide climate change adaptation, such as improvements to water management, by estimating the likelihood of contracting four diseases under a range of environmental conditions.

It is known that climate affects health, for example, excess rainfall can cause sewage overflow, leading to outbreaks of waterborne disease, and higher temperatures can influence disease incidence by either encouraging or restricting pathogen reproduction, depending on the species.

Concerns have therefore been raised about the impacts of climate change on public health. In response to a World Health Organization call for new decision-support tools to assess climate change’s potential health impacts, the authors of this EU-funded study,A Decision Support Tool to Compare Waterborne and Foodborne Infection and/or Illness Risks Associated with Climate Change, J Schijven, M Bouwknegt, A M de Roda Husman et al developed a software package to assess the risk from climate change (CC-QMRA: Climate Change Quantitative Microbial Risk Assessment).

This study was funded by the European Centre of Disease Prevention and Control (ECDC), an agency of the EU. It estimates the risk of infection by norovirus, Cryptosporidium, and Campylobacter and non-cholera Vibrio species, which can all cause gastroenteritis....

Feeding chickens in Hungary, shot by Civertan, Wikimedia Commons, under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license 

H7N9 bird flu resurges in China ahead of Lunar New Year

CNN: ... In recent weeks, China has seen a spike in cases and experts are worried that infections will gather pace as the country celebrates the Lunar New Year this week - a peak time for travel and for poultry sales. Since the strain was first reported in Shanghai in February 2013, it has affected 246 in mainland China, according to Hong Kong's Department of Health. The World Health Organization says that 56 have died from the disease.

The number of cases faded after May, but returned in late 2013. Like all flu strains, H7N9 cases increase during colder months. In January alone, 19 deaths and 96 human cases have been reported, according to figures from the Chinese Center for Disease Control cited by state news agency Xinhua on Monday -- rivaling the initial wave of H7N9 cases seen in March 2013.

Cases have also been reported in Taiwan and in Hong Kong, which on Tuesday began culling 20,000 chickens after a sample of live chicken imported from mainland China tested positive for H7 viruses According to the WHO, most of the human cases were exposed to the H7N9 virus through contact with poultry or contaminated environments, such as live bird markets,

"When the chickens are very overcrowded, at the time of festivals like Christmas, Chinese New Year, and there are no bio-security measures taken, then the virus spreads through poultry very quickly," said Dr. Kwok-Yung Yuen, chair of infectious diseases at the University of Hong Kong. "It's also possible that travelers will bring live poultry back to their own villages," he added....

Fowl cages at a market in Shenzhen, shot by Daniel Case, Wikimedia Commons, under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license

Stopping disease swaps between humans and animals

Dana MacLean in IRIN: With more than half of all human infections originating in animals, experts say a multi-sectoral, global response to zoonoses - diseases passing between animals and humans - is urgently needed. IRIN talked to a panel of experts to learn just how deadly humans and animals can be to one another, and ultimately how each can save the other.

“By neglecting the health of animals and ecosystems, we fail to recognize that human health is inextricably linked with animal and ecosystem health,” said Laura H. Kahn, a physician and researcher at Princeton University in the US. Khan co-founded the One Health Initiative, which links human health to how well animals and the ecosystem fare.

With almost half of the some 1,000 pathogen species found in livestock and animals kept as pets able to cross over into humans, poor animal health undoubtedly increases the risk of poor human health, experts warn.

Known zoonoses cause an estimated 2.3 billion cases of sickness and 1.7 million human deaths annually, reported the Nairobi-headquartered International Livestock Research Institute (ILRI) in 2012. But then there are the unknown viruses, which are estimated to number at least 320,000, according to calculations by Simon Anthony and co-researchers published in 2013.

...A good part of zoonoses (some 70 percent of which come from wildlife) are directly attributable to human actions that have vastly changed animal environments, decreasing animals’ resilience against infection and boosting the risk of humans falling ill....

A livestock market in Buenos Aries, shot by Jorge Royan, Wikimedia Commons, under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license

Vaccinating cattle against E. coli O157 could cut human cases of infection by 85 percent

Seed Daily via SPX: Vaccinating cattle against the E. coli O157 bacterium could cut the number of human cases of the disease by 85%, according to scientists. The bacteria, which cause severe gastrointestinal illness and even death in humans, are spread by consuming contaminated food and water, or by contact with livestock faeces in the environment. Cattle are the main reservoir for the bacterium.

The vaccines that are available for cattle are rarely used, but could be significant.

The research was lead by a team of researchers at the University of Glasgow in collaboration with the University of Edinburgh, the Royal Veterinary College, Scotland's Rural College, Health Protection Scotland, and the Scottish E. coli O157/VTEC Reference Laboratory.

The study, published in the online journal PNAS, used veterinary, human and molecular data to examine the risks of E. coli O157 transmission from cattle to humans, and to estimate the impact of vaccinating cattle.

The risk of E. coli O157 infection is particularly significant when the cattle are 'super-shedding' - excreting extremely high numbers of bacteria in their faeces for a limited period of time. Vaccines against the bacteria exist that can reduce super-shedding....

E. coli shot by Mattosaurus, public domain

First likely case of H7N9 bird flu spread by humans reported

Terra Daily via AFP: Chinese scientists on Wednesday reported the first likely case of direct person-to-person transmission of the H7N9 bird flu virus that has killed over 40 people since March.

The development was "worrying" and should be closely watched, the team wrote in the British online journal bmj.com, but stressed that the virus, believed to jump from birds to people, was still inadept at spreading among humans.

"People should not panic," epidemiologist Chang-jun Bao of the hard-hit Jiangsu province's Center for Disease Control and Prevention, told AFP of the report that he co-authored. "The transmissibility of this novel virus... was not so effective."

Scientists have long feared the virus would mutate into a form that transmits easily from person to person. In the new study, Bao and a team report on the case of a 60-year-old man who died in hospital after contracting the H7N9 virus, which he apparently transmitted to his daughter. The 32-year-old woman, who had nursed her father for over a week, also died in hospital...

China paper says farm sector raises bird flu risk

Seed Daily via AFP: A state-backed Chinese newspaper Sunday blamed "intense" farming methods for heightening the risk of deadly diseases such as H7N9 bird flu crossing from animals to humans.

China has confirmed 18 cases -- including six deaths -- of the new strain of avian influenza, so far confined to its developed east coast, since announcing a week ago that the virus had been discovered in humans for the first time.

"Normally, diseases are likely to break out in poor areas. Why is it the other way around in China?" the Global Times editorial said.

"In China's southern and eastern coastal areas, agriculture, especially animal husbandry, has become more intense and populations more dense," said the English-language edition of the paper, known for its pro-China stance.

"There is greater chance of contact between humans and animals and subsequent diseases. Local authorities have to develop disease prevention and control methods to match this situation, but this is a weak spot in the country's overall development."...

Bird flu jumps to seals, humans could be next

Environment News Service: A bird flu virus known for 10 years has now infected aquatic mammals, and the scientists who discovered the source of the infection are warning that the virus could become a public health threat.

The virus, known as avian H3N8 influenza A, was responsible for an outbreak of fatal pneumonia that has infected harbor seals in New England, a scientific team has found. The death of these seals is a U.S. federally recognized “unusual mortality event.“

The discovery of the connection between the bird flu virus and the seal deaths was made by a team of scientists from the Center for Infection and Immunity at Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Association, the New England Aquarium, the U.S. Geological Survey’s National Wildlife Health Center, SeaWorld and the EcoHealth Alliance.

“This outbreak is particularly significant, not only because of the disease it caused in seals but also because the virus has naturally acquired mutations that are known to increase transmissibility and virulence in mammals,” the scientists write in the current issue of “mBio,” a journal published by the American Society for Microbiology....

Harbor seals at the aquarium in Norwalk, Connecticut, shot by Sgt. R.K. Blue, Wikimedia Commons, under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported license

Are environmental changes spreading Rift Valley and Lassa fevers?

Delia Grace in the povertymatters blog at the Guardian (UK):  Animals in Africa, both wild and domesticated, sustain livelihoods and promote wellbeing. They provide nutrition, labour, trade and currency, and bring millions of tourist dollars into the continent every year.

Yet, increasingly, they also bring disease. Since 1940, more than 60% of infectious diseases newly affecting people in Africa have been transmitted via animals. But even more important are the "classical" zoonoses such as bovine TB or pig tapeworm. Recent research shows that, globally, the top 13 zoonotic diseases are responsible for 2.2 million human deaths every year. The vast majority of these deaths are in low- and middle-income countries, where they often affect disenfranchised communities.

Even when these diseases do not kill, their effects devastate poor people's lives and hamper development efforts. Such diseases have the potential to cross countries and continents with alarming speed – witness the spread of Sars and avian flu in recent years.

A handful of high-profile zoonotic diseases such as avian flu attract vast amounts of research money. But there is a large and growing number that are poorly understood and in which there has been much less investment in research or control. Zoonoses fall between the medical and veterinary sectors and are among the most underdiagnosed diseases.

Although mapping work is adding to our knowledge of which zoonotic diseases are affecting whom and where this is happening, there remains little understanding of how their spread is affected by shifting environmental factors. There is strong evidence emerging, though, that such links do exist....

The Rift Valley Fever virus

New study maps hotspots of human-animal infectious diseases and emerging disease outbreaks

Science Codex: A new global study mapping human-animal diseases like tuberculosis (TB) and Rift Valley fever finds that an "unlucky" 13 zoonoses are responsible for 2.4 billion cases of human illness and 2.2 million deaths per year. The vast majority occur in low- and middle-income countries.

The report, which was conducted by the International Livestock Research Institute (ILRI), the Institute of Zoology (UK) and the Hanoi School of Public Health in Vietnam, maps poverty, livestock-keeping and the diseases humans get from animals, and presents a "top 20" list of geographical hotspots.

"From cyst-causing tapeworms to avian flu, zoonoses present a major threat to human and animal health," said Delia Grace, a veterinary epidemiologist and food safety expert with ILRI in Kenya and lead author of the study. "Targeting the diseases in the hardest hit countries is crucial to protecting global health as well as to reducing severe levels of poverty and illness among the world's one billion poor livestock keepers."

"Exploding global demand for livestock products is likely to fuel the spread of a wide range of human-animal infectious diseases," Grace added.

According to the study, Ethiopia, Nigeria, and Tanzania in Africa, as well as India in Asia, have the highest zoonotic disease burdens, with widespread illness and death. Meanwhile, the northeastern United States, Western Europe (especially the United Kingdom), Brazil and parts of Southeast Asia may be hotspots of "emerging zoonoses"—those that are newly infecting humans, are newly virulent, or have newly become drug resistant. The study examined the likely impacts of livestock intensification and climate change on the 13 zoonotic diseases currently causing the greatest harm to the world's poor....

Edward Hicks, "The Cornell Farm," 1848

Pestilence, pandemics, and climate change

The Conversation (Australia): Recent outbreaks of deadly bat-borne diseases could be a sign of things to come as rising heat and changing rains help the spread of infectious disease in Australia. Such is the warning that Professor Tony McMichael of the Australian National University’s National Centre for Epidemiology and Population Health will deliver in a public lecture next week.

In his advance notes for the talk, Professor McMichael writes that “recent outbreaks of bat-borne viral diseases in horses and humans in Australia are a pointer to likely future risks to human health – as climate change causes the displacement of species such as bats from their natural habitat (and, perhaps, into the urban and suburban environments).” Professor McMichael will also talk about the growing chance that mosquitoes carrying dengue fever will make their way to Australia, given their expanding territorial reach in countries including Japan and the Philippines.

In notes for the lecture, Professor McMichael mentions that climate change partly triggered the 14th Century Black Death that killed up to half of the population of many European cities. He also writes that the last decade’s leap in the reach of the dengue mosquito (Aedes albopictus) into Manila jumped the most when the greatest year-on-year warming occurred (2005-2006). In Japan the dengue mosquito has “extended its zone northwards by 500 kilometres over the past half century in association with warming”....

A sign in Singleton, New South Wales, shot by Peter Firminger, Wikimedia Commons, under the Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license

Animals harbor a deadly time bomb

Deborah Smith in the Brisbane Times (Australia): ...It is estimated that 75 per cent of emerging infectious diseases in people - many of them fatal - originate in animals. The current Hendra outbreak in Queensland and NSW is a prime example. The virus was unknown 20 years ago, but now there are regular outbreaks and it has killed four of the seven people who have become infected since 1994.

Bats carry the virus without any ill effects, but when horses contract it, possibly after exposure to the faeces, urine or birth fluids of the bats, they develop a serious respiratory illness. Humans in contact with the sick horses can then also become infected, with deadly consequences. Many other viruses follow a similar pattern, moving from wildlife to domestic animals and then on to people. The virus that causes Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome, or SARS, emerged from bats and affected civet cats before infecting more than 8400 people in 2003, killing about 750.

The deadly H5N1 bird flu has also been passed from wild birds to domestic birds to people. This pattern of transmission demonstrates why a ''One Health'' approach - that recognises the interdependence of human, animal and environmental health, and seeks to improve all three - is needed to successfully tackle emerging diseases, says Dr Martyn Jeggo, director of the CSIRO's high-security Australian Animal Health Laboratory in Geelong. ''To manage the risks effectively we need to get wildlife ecologists and those who study the environment working with those who deal with animal health, working closely with the medical fraternity, to look at things from a more holistic point of view,'' he says.

The threat of emerging diseases is increasing for a variety of reasons, says Jeggo, who chaired the organising committee for the 1st International One Health Congress held in Melbourne earlier this year. ''We encroach far more on our environment than we ever did before - into habitats where wildlife traditionally existed.'' This not only brings people, but also their domesticated animals, into greater potential contact with infectious agents carried by wild animals.

Intensification of livestock industries has also contributed to the problem. In a large poultry enclosure, for example, a virus has more opportunity to mutate as it passes between the birds, possibly becoming more infectious to people. ''We've increased that risk,'' says Jeggo. Global travel adds to the woes, with people moving rapidly around the world, taking viruses from places where people might have immunity to those where most people are vulnerable, he says.

''One can't but be amazed at the speed with which SARS moved around the world, from China through to Hong Kong and right across to Canada in such a short time.'' Climate change can also influence the spread of disease, in particular by shifting the regions where insects like mosquitoes, which harbour viruses, can exist....

An X-ray image of someone infected with SARS, from the Centers for Disease Control

Farm animal disease to increase with climate change

Science Daily: Researchers looked at changes in the behaviour of bluetongue -- a viral disease of cattle and sheep -- from the 1960s to the present day, as well as what could happen to the transmission of the virus 40 years into the future. They found, for the first time, that an outbreak of a disease could be explained by changes to the climate.

In Europe, more than 80,000 outbreaks of bluetongue were reported to the World Animal Health Organisation between 1998 and 2010, and millions of animals died as a result of the disease. Bluetongue was previously restricted to Africa and Asia, but its emergence in Europe is thought to be linked to increased temperatures, which allows the insects that carry the virus to spread to new regions and transmit the virus more effectively.

Researchers produced a mathematical model that explains how the risk of an outbreak of bluetongue virus in Europe changes under different climate conditions. The team examined the effect of past climate on the risk of the virus over the past 50 years to understand the specific triggers for disease outbreak over time and throughout geographical regions. This model was then driven forwards in time, using predictive climate models, to the year 2050, to show how the disease may react to future climate change.

Using these future projections, researchers found that in northern Europe there could be a 17% increase in incidence of the bluetongue virus, compared to 7% in southern regions, where it is already much warmer...

A female sheep with bluetongue disease, shot by Fourrure (http://www.boulesdefourrure.fr), Wikimedia Commons via Flickr, under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 Generic license

Warning on animal-borne diseases

PR Newswire: In a speech presented today at the TEDMED 2010 Conference in San Diego, Calif., Peter Daszak, a leading disease ecologist and president of EcoHealth Alliance (formerly Wildlife Trust), cautioned attendees about the rise in the number and severity of animal-borne diseases that jump to humans. In fact, approximately 75 percent of emerging infectious diseases affecting humans today is of zoonotic origin (a disease that jumps from wild or domestic animals and spreads to humans).

"Around the world a rising number of diseases like SARS, monkeypox, and HIV are spread due to trade in wildlife, and these diseases have serious public health, economic, and conservation consequences," Dr. Daszak said. "Using EcoHealth Alliance's unparalleled experience in the field, the organization is working to identify, predict and mitigate disease outbreaks."

As the leading cause of human fatalities worldwide, infectious diseases lead to the deaths of 13 million people per year, and over three-quarters of emerging infectious diseases (EIDs) originate from wild or domestic animals and spread to humans. According to Daszak, biological impoverishment, habitat fragmentation, climate change, increasing toxification, and the rapid global movement of people and other living organisms have diminished ecosystem function, which results in unprecedented levels of disease. These factors pose a threat to the survival and health of all species.


To provide a real-world living example of this very serious situation, Daszak introduced the TEDMED audience to what he calls, "the cutest, scariest animal on the planet" -- the sugar glider, which is a small gliding marsupial with huge round eyes and a long tail. "I'm most afraid of this particular little animal, because the people are going into the forests of Indonesia to catch them, bring them into captivity, and ship them around the world – straight into our homes, where we hold them, kiss them, and cuddle up to them," he said. "What easier way could there be for any one of this species' 100 new viruses to spread to humans?"….

Let me infect you! A sugar glider, shot by Alessandro Di Grazia, Wikimedia Commons, under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported

Wildlife health reporting tools may help prevent human illness

A very cool idea from the US Geological survey: Two new tools that enable the public to report sick or dead wild animals could also lead to the detection and containment of wildlife disease outbreaks that may pose a health risk to people. The Wildlife Health Event Reporter (WHER) is a new website that enables anyone with an Internet connection to report sightings of sick or dead wildlife.

HealthMap.org has enhanced its mobile phone application “Outbreaks Near Me” to accept and relay wildlife health reports to the WHER site. The application continues to accept reports of human illness. Researchers in the Nelson Institute for Environmental Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and the U.S. Geological Survey National Wildlife Health Center in Madison created the WHER so that people around the world can easily share information about possible health threats to wildlife and humans.

“Avian influenza, SARS, West Nile virus, and rabies are just a few of the rogues’ gallery of human diseases in which wildlife play a role. Seventy-five percent of recent emerging infectious diseases in humans began as animal infections, and most of these have involved wildlife,” explains USGS scientist Joshua Dein, one of the WHER’s developers. “If these tools had been available 10 years ago, we might have had an earlier identification of West Nile virus by people reporting that they were seeing dead crows in their backyards,” said Dein. “We don’t know what the next emerging disease outbreak will be, but given recent history, it will likely be preceded by wildlife health events.”

Users of the WHER create accounts online to register sightings of sick or dead wildlife. Anyone can visit the site to see what others have reported and can subscribe to an RSS feed to receive new reports via e-mail. Reports can be limited to specific states, and data can be readily exported or sent through special feeds to other websites. Local wildlife officials who wish to be notified of observations also can subscribe and, when available, their contact information will be given to those who submit reports.

...Dein notes that the WHER is experimental and will require high participation rates over a considerable period of time to provide useful data. He adds that despite the connections between human and animal diseases, people should not view wildlife as a threat to human health. “A more accurate vision is that we all share risks from these disease threats,” said Dein. “These new tools can help researchers use wildlife as sentinels to alert us to diseases in the environment.”...

Jan Weenix in 1692, "Der weiße Pfau" (the white peacock)

Deadly animal diseases poised to infect humans

Jeremy Laurance in the Independent (UK) summarizes some recent work on zoonotic diseases: The world is facing a growing threat from new diseases that are jumping the human-animal species barrier as a result of environmental disruption, global warming and the progressive urbanisation of the planet, scientists have warned. At least 45 diseases that have passed from animals to humans have been reported to UN agencies in the last two decades, with the number expected to escalate in the coming years.

Dramatic changes to the environment are triggering major alterations to human disease patterns on a scale last seen during the industrial revolution. Montira Pongsiri, an environmental health scientist at the US Environmental Protection Agency in Washington, says that previous transitions in human history have had a devastating impact in terms of the spread of disease. "We appear to be undergoing a distinct change in global disease ecology. The recent emergence of infectious diseases appears to be driven by globalisation and ecological disruption," Dr Pongsiri said.

He and eight colleagues examined five emerging and re-emerging diseases – malaria, lyme disease (spread by ticks), Hantavirus (spread by mice and rats), West Nile disease (spread by mosquitoes), and schistosomiasis (spread by freshwater snails). They argue that changes in land use, farming practices and climate lie behind the increasing number of outbreaks.

…Dr Pongsiri and colleagues say that the number of people who succumbed to infectious diseases plummeted in the developed world during the industrial revolution, but the rise of manufacturing and pollution levels increased the incidence of chronic diseases including cancer, allergies and birth defects. Now, we are in the grip of another epidemiological transition driven by the destruction of plant and animal habitats, the loss of species and changes that have brought more humans into closer contact with animals than at any stage in human history, they say in the journal Bioscience.

…The behaviour of these new viruses is unpredictable – scientists don't know how likely they are to jump the species barrier into humans. But with more of them circulating, there is a higher chance of this happening, Dr Slingenbergh said. Flu viruses are getting closer to people and food, and agriculture practices are to blame. He said: "There is no evidence to suggest this is going to end any time soon. Agriculture looks set to continue growing for another two decades, and we are only at the beginning of climate change."…

Transmission electron micrograph of Sin Nombre virus, also known as hantavirus