Disease Emergence...

 


Disease Emergence

and Resurgence:

The Wildlife-Human

Connection

by Milton Friend, James W. Hurley,

Pauline Nol, and Katherine Wesenberg

U.S. Department of the Interior / U.S. Geological Survey, 2006


This book, chronicling a truly stunning variety of diseases afflicting animals (enzootic) and animals and people (zoonotic) will, no doubt, find a ready audience among veterinarians and wildlife biologists. But a copy should be included with the diploma handed out to every newly minted doctor and, for that matter, to every doctor. These are the diseases of the 21st century.


While some diseases, such as bird flu, SARS, and hantavirus bask in a headline glow -- at least during outbreaks -- others cause catastrophes well beneath the editorial radar. Marine calciviruses, for example, afflicting sea mammals, fish, amphibians and reptiles, have also been known to attack terrestrial livestock. Meanwhile, dolphins and sea lions are now vulnerable to a morbillivirus, a strain of distemper that likely originated in dogs. 


This nearly 400-page book (glossary, appendices and index included) is full of charts, graphs and footnotes. But it is the photographs that fascinate and frighten: a mountain of ducks dead from duck plague; cormorant chicks snuffed out by Newcastle disease before they could fly; corals ailing from any number of illnesses;  tumors on sea turtles, rabbits and deer; close-ups of a human hand and leg dotted with monkeypox.


At least 60% of all human pathogens are zoonotic, and at least 75% of the dozens of new diseases that have “emerged” in the last 30 years, such as AIDS and ebola. But zoonosis a two-way street. Thanks to us, wild gorillas now get mange and measles, while chimpanzees suffer from polio.


DE&R covers both the diseases themselves and some of the reasons behind their spread (trade, travel, changes in agricultural practices, urban sprawl, exotic pets, etc.).


The book is available as a free download at the National Wildlife Health Center website. For a hard copy call the NWHC at 608.270.2400.


- j.a.g.