When I grow up, I want to be...
Tracey MacNamara. She was the pathologist for the Bronx zoo, who made the connection between dying crows, a cormorant (who are, btw, the most awesome birds ever), some flamingos and humans with encephalitis, leading to the discovery that West Nile virus had hit our shores.
If people had listened to her sooner, or if we had any real surveillance of wildlife disease in this country, the virus's spread across the country might have been halted by aggressive mosquito-control measures early in the season. At the least, human lives would have been saved if folks knew to avoid being out in the evening, and MD's knew what they were treating.
And West Nile isn't the only example; *all* of our major emerging diseases are zoonotic, and most have wildlife hosts or vectors: hantavirus (mice), SARS (bats), a host of viral encephalidities (birds and mosquitoes), Lyme disease (with a mouse-tick-deer cycle), influenza (swine and poultry), hendra virus (bats again), and even ebola clearly *has* a wildlife vector, we just don't know what it is. Have I missed any? Oh, and HIV was originally contracted by hunters butchering chimps for meat. Maybe there's an important emerging disease out there that's not a zoonosis, but I can't think of one at the moment. It would be the exception, anyway.
But nobody *owns* wildlife. No one notices when they get sick, until lots of individuals are dying, or acting strangely. And few people are concerned enough to fund programs to monitor them. So even when people start dying, it takes too much time to connect the human and animal illnesses.
This is why we need to recognize that it's all One Medicine, and get our collective asses together and put together a real, functional wildlife disease surveillance program in the US. Europe is doing this already; we could even learn from theirs. We need veterinarians, MD's, virologists and epidemiologists all working together; and yes, the vets are key! MD's don't learn about diseases in other species, so when a bug jumps species they just don't have all the pieces.
Ok...coming down from my soapbox, now.
If people had listened to her sooner, or if we had any real surveillance of wildlife disease in this country, the virus's spread across the country might have been halted by aggressive mosquito-control measures early in the season. At the least, human lives would have been saved if folks knew to avoid being out in the evening, and MD's knew what they were treating.
And West Nile isn't the only example; *all* of our major emerging diseases are zoonotic, and most have wildlife hosts or vectors: hantavirus (mice), SARS (bats), a host of viral encephalidities (birds and mosquitoes), Lyme disease (with a mouse-tick-deer cycle), influenza (swine and poultry), hendra virus (bats again), and even ebola clearly *has* a wildlife vector, we just don't know what it is. Have I missed any? Oh, and HIV was originally contracted by hunters butchering chimps for meat. Maybe there's an important emerging disease out there that's not a zoonosis, but I can't think of one at the moment. It would be the exception, anyway.
But nobody *owns* wildlife. No one notices when they get sick, until lots of individuals are dying, or acting strangely. And few people are concerned enough to fund programs to monitor them. So even when people start dying, it takes too much time to connect the human and animal illnesses.
This is why we need to recognize that it's all One Medicine, and get our collective asses together and put together a real, functional wildlife disease surveillance program in the US. Europe is doing this already; we could even learn from theirs. We need veterinarians, MD's, virologists and epidemiologists all working together; and yes, the vets are key! MD's don't learn about diseases in other species, so when a bug jumps species they just don't have all the pieces.
Ok...coming down from my soapbox, now.