cc >> Welcome, everyone, to
Wednesday Nite at the Lab. I'm Tom Zinnen.
I work here at the UW Madison Biotechnology Center, and I also
work for UW Extension Cooperative Extension, and on
behalf of those folks and our other sponsors, Wisconsin Public
Television, the Wisconsin Alumni Association, and the Science
Alliance here at UW Madison, thanks for coming to Wednesday
Nite at the Lab. We do this every Wednesday
night, 50 times a year. Tonight it's my pleasure to
introduce to you two people. We're going to have a two-part
presentation. The second speaker who I'll
introduce first is Megan Hines, and she'll be talking about the
wildlife health event observation reporting.
Her portion of tonight's program will provide a demonstration of
an online reporting where anyone can share observations of
wildlife health events. These observations are
aggregated and made available in a variety of ways to the public,
to natural resource managers, to researchers, and to public
health officials in an effort to protect the well-being of all
living things and to promote a healthy ecosystem.
These reports can assist in the detection of common disease
events and also biosecurity concerns.
They can provide information to explore the interconnections
between human, domestic animal, and wildlife disease, and they
can help build baseline knowledge on wildlife mortality.
So that will be Megan's presentation.
Tonight, we're going to kick off with Joshua Dein.
He's a veterinary medical officer here at the
US Geological Survey's National Wildlife Health Center in
Madison. His background includes work as
an ornithologist, museum educator, and an endangered
species veterinarian. Most recently he has focused on
building tools and systems that make information about wildlife
diseases more easily available to the public, to researchers,
and to natural resource managers.
He actively participates in several federal government
inter-agency initiatives to strengthen the country's ability
to detect emerging diseases. I'm delighted to be able to have
both speakers tonight and to have the collaboration of such a
large group of people. It's a kind of Wednesday Nite at
the Lab that we haven't done before with a lot of interaction
online, and I really appreciate the help of everybody that's
been working on this over the last six or seven weeks to get
it all tied together. And with that, please join me in
welcoming Joshua to Wednesday Nite at the Lab.
[APPLAUSE]
Well, thank you, Tom, and thank you all for
joining us tonight. And I also want to thank the
Global Health Initiative which is also one of the sponsors of
this program. And so I also want to wish you
a happy solstice. I think the important thing is
to recognize that as an event. It's an environmental event
because that helps tie us to the world outside, not just the
human made world, but events all around us.
And that's going to be one of the themes in this presentation
is a relationship of all of us to the environment.
As Tom said, this may be different from many of the other
Wednesday nights because, as the title says, we're really looking
at this as a collaboration. We'd like to have an exchange of
information, so hopefully we'll get information from you as well
as I'll try to provide some information to you.
What we'd like to do is discuss the health of wildlife in all
sorts. So, what we're going to, whoops.
So, the first thing we'll talk about is wildlife health and
disease and the things surrounding that.
Then we'll talk for a little bit about how that relates to shared
risk from disease and introduce the concept of one health.
We'll then move on to looking at how do we detect disease events,
and then what you can do to help us with this whole process.
So, this is what most people like to think about wildlife,
healthy wildlife. In western culture, it's sort of
what life was in the Garden of Eden where things are living in
harmony with nature. We want to think about wildlife
as being healthy. There are a lot of studies that
have shown there's actually a calming effect by watching
animals, which is always a good thing.
And even if this extends to sort of pseudo-wildlife.
[LAUGHTER] So our friend Donald here may
not exactly be wildlife. In a lot of ways we extend the
same thinking and good feelings about wildlife to cartoon
characters, which is a good thing.
Unfortunately, this idealized idea of healthy wildlife isn't
always the case. Sometimes there are natural
dangers out in the world. There are predators.
There's competition for food and shelter.
There are severe weather events. There's all sorts of things that
can happen. There are also man made dangers.
Obviously, some animals get hit by cars.
There's habitat changes which can affect how they live.
They can be exposed to pollutants, bacteria, viruses.
And what we find out a lot is sometimes these events attract a
lot of media attention, but it's usually the large events.
And there are things people have concerns about.
So I'm not sure how many of you remember a year and a half ago
the big black bird die off in Arkansas where birds
were flying out of the sky. We affectionately call this the
aflockalypse. [LAUGHTER]
In reality it was a big event. It was 10,000 to 15,000 animals
but really nothing serious. They were all sort of startled
and sort of bashed into each other.
But that doesn't mean it's not important.
It's just, those are the kinds of things that get recognition.
And the media is really good at picking up on things.
The media also sort of does things like think about, during
the bird flu outbreak, Paris Disney Land was wondering if
Donald actually died of bird flu.
So you never know where these things are going to happen.
I don't think it happened, actually.
[LAUGHTER] So anybody who's really
concerned about that, rest assured.
I think Donald is alive and well.
So, our first question for the night is, with a show of hands,
how many of you have ever seen a sick or dead wild animal?
Okay, maybe the other thing I say.
Anybody who hasn't? All right, well that's a good
start. So, can I have three volunteers
that want to tell me about what animal they saw?
Volunteers? Okay, one.
A deer on the side of the road.
Okay. What did you think about that?
Not a whole lot. [LAUGHTER]
Okay, it was a deer on the side of the road, right?
Okay, that's cool. Did you do anything about it?
Did you tell anybody about it? Okay.
How about somebody else? Yeah?
A dead bat in my water bucket.
Wow, okay. That's cool.
I think. [LAUGHTER]
Dead bat, so that must have been kind of startling.
Yes. >> Yeah?
So, what do you think about that?
I wanted to know why it had died.
Okay. All right.
I then fished it out of the rain bucket, and I called my
neighbor. >> Okay.
So we have a dead bat in a bucket that sort of, how did you
dispose of it? Did you throw it in the trash?
I buried it. >> Buried it.
Okay, you buried it. Did you tell anybody else other
than your neighbor? >> No.
No, okay, good. All right, one more.
Yeah? >> I had a lethargic squirrel in
my rose bush. When it would try to walk it was
like it was like this. >> Okay, so we have a very
sort of obviously sick squirrel. In your backyard, I assume.
Front yard. >> Front yard.
Okay, that's cool. [LAUGHTER]
All right, so what was the outcome of that?
I got a big heavy towel and put it on a tree.
Okay. >> I never saw it again after
that. >> Okay, and that's probably
a good thing. So we have a sick squirrel,
tried to do something, put it in a tree, never saw it again, but
did you tell anybody about this? >> No.
Okay. So, things happen out there.
All right, so now that we have those kinds of details, we had
that kind of story, maybe, as you asked, you want to know why
it died? Well, I can't tell you why that
bat died. And that's a whole other issue
in itself, but I think what we can do is we can examine what
the possibilities are or other things that may cause it, and
that gives us the opportunity to play a new game show.
[LAUGHTER]
Called Name That Doom! [LAUGHTER]
Okay, so I have on the screen here five general categories
of things that might cause illness or death in wildlife.
All right, your job is to identify what those things are.
So I'll entertain guesses for what's behind this.
Back there. >> Cars.
Cars. So accidents, trauma.
[BELL DINGS] [LAUGHTER]
Okay, right there. >> Predators.
Predators. [BELL DINGS]
[LAUGHTER] Okay.
Weather. >> Weather.
That's a good one. [BELL DINGS]
I put that one into this category here which is
environmental quality. Now, that could do a whole lot
of different things. That could be climate change,
it could be habitat change, extreme weather events.
And we've got a couple more. >> People.
People. Could you be more specific about
that? [INAUDIBLE]
All right, and what would these humans do?
Well, it's like they could maybe throw out rotten meat for
them or something and they eat that stuff.
Okay, so they throw out other things like chemicals, poisons,
things like that. All right, so we have all sorts
of other garbage that humans produce.
[BELL DINGS]
All right, hey, it's just technology.
[LAUGHTER] All right, there we go.
How's that? And the final one?
Yeah, over there. >> Being shot.
Being shot. I'll put that into the accidents
and trauma. So that's, as we call it, it's
sort of like acute traumatic lead poisoning.
[LAUGHTER] Okay.
There. >> Infectious disease.
All right. [BELL DINGS]
All right. So, congratulations,
you've won the quiz. >> We just got a call
from Merv Griffin. [LAUGHTER]
I thought it was going to be Michael Feldman.
[LAUGHTER] All right, your prize will be
helping us to better understand how these kinds of things
will affect wildlife. So what we're really going to do
is we're going to focus on this area down here, on the
infectious diseases that can cause it.
And I'm going to try to use West Nile virus, which I'm sure all
of you have heard about, as sort of an example of this.
So, the next thing is to say, all right, now we know what the
kinds of things that may cause things, how does this happen?
Okay, so if you think about this, it doesn't just happen.
Disease events are, you can think of them as a complex
puzzle. Each of these puzzle pieces can
exist by themselves, but when all the pieces come together you
might have some kind of a disease event.
So, again, using West Nile virus we can talk about this robin.
It looks healthy. But animals are individuals.
They have genetic variation I can tell you from personal
experience when I provided the veterinary care for the whooping
cranes, which are genetically really limited, boy, are they
different individuals. I mean, one could say, you can
do that, no you can't do that. So they really have abilities to
withstand different things. And I'm sure you've seen the
same thing in pets. They're not the same creatures.
So we can assume that robin is healthy, but we don't know what
else is going on. Is there enough food in his
territory? Obviously during times with
little rain it's hard to pull those worms out of the ground.
So how do they get by? This spring, are they defending
territory? Is he spending a lot of energy
doing that? Those stressful activities,
anything that decreases condition can make an animal
more susceptible to a disease. Okay, so we have this robin.
That's one part of the puzzle. We have a host.
We have something that can get a disease.
Then the robin has to live someplace, so he lives in your
backyard, right? Where all good robins should
live. But in your backyard, you're in
control of that. That's his environment, but it's
not necessarily a natural thing. So what kind of pesticides have
been used in your backyard? Are they affecting his food
resource? Herbicides, maybe?
Do you have old pots filled with water that served as breeding
places of mosquitoes? Those are things you can control
in his environment. And so the robin sort of shares
a lot of your backyard with other animals, other birds,
blue jays, for example, but also mosquitoes.
Now, I'll tell you if you have mosquitoes that size in your
backyard, move. [LAUGHTER]
I don't think there's any question about that.
So, let's say that he is, that robin is living in your backyard
with all these other creatures, and one of the other creatures
that is living there is this virus, and that actually is a
picture of West Nile virus. Now, viruses, like animals,
aren't always the same. Some of them are nastier than
others. They can mutate as we're seeing
with influenza virus. So this virus is living there.
Now, viruses don't live, can't live outside a host.
So we're assuming that he's living there.
And let's say the robin's buddy, the blue jay, met up with a
mosquito that was actually carrying that virus.
Okay? He got bitten five days ago.
Still okay, still not showing, not getting sick, but then this
mosquito then bites the blue jay and then goes and bites the
robin, and you put all of these things together and you have
West Nile virus disease. Okay?
Which has really hit the east coast population of robins
fairly hard according to some studies, as well as a number of
other species. We're hoping there's a rebound,
but it certainly did have an effect.
So, these causes of wildlife disease and how they occur, the
next question would be, why do we care about this?
Okay, so we have three different diseases here, and these
diseases that primarily affect just wildlife.
So we have botulism, which is very different from human
botulism, avian botulism. It's a significant problem in
the Great Lakes these days but is known for quite a while.
It can cause deaths in waterfowl but a lot of other animals as
well. A hundred thousand, five hundred
thousand, or even one report of a million casualties in one
outbreak. So this can cause a lot of bird
death. Mycoplasma is a bacterial
disease that actually was first seen at bird feeders.
And so you get these birds with really big swollen eyes and they
can't see anything, it's hard to eat, and they don't do very
well, but a good example of people identifying a disease
before we even really know about it.
And then our latest tragedy is white-nose syndrome in bats.
Whereas, this is something that's brand new and is
spreading and can have a really significant affect on those
populations. So those are just things I've
said, but if you think about it, why do you care about wildlife,
if you do at all? And so I think that really
depends on who you are and what your perspective is.
And different people have different reasons.
So, if we look at one, one of them may just be empathy.
You just sort of say, oh, that's too bad.
I think, going back to the Eden approach, I think everything
should have a healthy life. And I think most people think
that about most things. But this sort of shatters that
whole idea. Okay, you may have a
conservation concern. I talked about the population
effects on robins, on waterfowl with botulism.
And anytime you take an animal out of an ecosystem and lower
the biodiversity, that can have serious consequences.
And we're just really now trying to learn how those effects of
loss in biodiversity really affects the whole system.
Recreation. There's a wide range of
recreational activities associated with wildlife.
Some people are hunters. Some people are bird watchers.
Some people are bird feeders. Some people are deer feeders.
So there's lots of different things.
So any of those things, and of these diseases that decrease the
number of animals that you can see, hunt, feed actually
probably is a concern because they're not there anymore.
And lastly, if none of these work for you, how about
aesthetics? So, if you talk about a hundred
thousand dead ducks and you want to go to the beach, you might
not like rotting carcasses strewn all over the beach.
So even if you don't care anything about wildlife, you may
not like to squish carcasses under your feet.
So, all of that just recognizes that we all bring different
perspectives to this, and, even more, there's even other reasons
to actually care. And sort of thinking about
wildlife in general, if you can sort of summarize thinking, is
how do you feel about wildlife. You may not care.
You may just don't want to have dead animals around, or you may
go, ah, a cute little raccoon, a little baby.
Or it could be this. [LAUGHTER]
A quite angry raccoon, maybe a sick raccoon.
And so is there a question as I'm happy with this one, but I'm
afraid of that one. Which do we do?
Are we concerned about this animal getting, the baby getting
sick? Or the angry one getting sick?
And are you concerned about the angry one getting you sick from
a disease that it might have? So that's another concern we
haven't really even talked about.
But in reality, it's not their health versus our health.
In reality, I encourage you to think about this as one health.
Okay? One health.
There are lots of definitions but we can use the one at the
bottom which is talking about optimal health for people,
domestic animals, wildlife, plants, and our environment.
So if you look at this somewhat complex diagram, one of the most
important things here is the environment.
So the healthy ecosystem and environmental quality really has
an effect on everything else, as we talked about in the disease
puzzle. So we have wildlife, we have
domestic animals, and we have humans all living in the same
area, and a lot of those things interact, and, certainly, where
potentially there can be disease interactions amongst those
groups. And to think about all these
features, the operative word here is sharing.
Okay? You're sharing the environment.
In a lot of ways you're sharing diseases as well.
So here are the things we share. Diseases can be shared between
humans and other animals. As much as some people don't
like to admit, humans are animals.
And because of that, it makes it that much easier to move disease
back and forth. And, in fact, there's good
evidence that humans give diseases to wildlife.
For example, in Africa there's good evidence that lowland
gorillas have been affected by ecotourists bringing unknown
disease to their environment. So, these are called,
collectively, zoonoses, or just zoonotic diseases.
And so I may use those terms in the presentation.
So, how do we share these kinds of diseases?
Are they all around us? Well, actually, there's usually
two, well we'll narrow it down to two things.
Direct contact which means if you're going to touch an animal
or something that came from the animal, that's a potential
problem. Okay, now most people don't get
to have poop slides in their talks.
[LAUGHTER] So if a raccoon has ever left
a present for you on your deck, you'll know what I mean.
Now, the reality is that should have a big biohazard symbol
around it. All right?
That's not a good thing to play around with nor have kids play
around this because that raccoon poop could have a parasite that
affects people. All right?
So, in general, the idea of handling wildlife or handling
anything that comes from wildlife, and not just wildlife,
pets, domestic anything, the good hygiene is always
necessary. So lots of hand washing.
And you got to remember that as humans are animals, hand washing
also limits or reduces passing diseases from people to people.
In fact, it's stated as the most effective preventive measure you
can take is frequent hand washing.
So just something to think is in the idea that we're all sharing
things, and we want to keep some of these things to ourselves.
Okay, the second part is that disease sometimes needs buddies
called vectors which are things, usually other animals, that
transfers and infected organism, bacteria, virus, parasite,
fungus, from one host to another.
And the most common villains here are ticks and mosquitoes.
You all know that sort of our local deer tick, I'm not sure
that is a deer tick, for Lyme disease and mosquitoes
for West Nile virus. But sometimes they even need
some help, and they need the help of a reservoir.
And a reservoir carries this infected organism without
actually being harmed. And there's a great story here
about our friend the white-footed mouse, which is the
best, as far as we can tell, a really good reservoir
for Lyme disease. Now, the interesting thing is
these white-footed mice, basic field mice, do really well in
fragmented habitats. That means sort of suburbia
woodlands that have been chopped up into different pieces where
the diversity of animals is not very large.
And so they thrive where there aren't a lot of predators, where
there aren't a lot of other competition.
And so since they're really good at holding onto this bacteria,
this Lyme disease organism, as you decrease the number of other
animals that the ticks can bite, you increase the possibility
that the white-footed mice is going to have the disease.
And so more and more ticks are going to be infected, which then
can transmit this disease to you.
So it's another good reason to think that we have to think of
our changes in our environment and how that affects the threat
of disease transmission from wildlife to people.
So it's something that we have some control over, and we have
to think about everything we do in this regard.
Okay, so I've given you a couple examples of zoonotic disease.
Let's just add to that list. So we've talked about Lyme
disease and West Nile virus. How many people think
that we have plague in the United States?
Usually when I say that to people, they say the same
plague? I go, yeah, it's the same
plague. It's been around for a long,
long time. All of those things are examples
of diseases that are transmitted by vectors.
So we Lyme disease by ticks, West Nile virus by mosquitoes,
and plague by fleas. Now, there are other vectors
involved, but those are the main ones for that group.
Then for the direct contact part you have the granddaddy of all
zoonotic diseases: rabies. Probably the oldest thing known.
Then we have, everybody's heard about bird flu.
Monkey pox, sort of a big flash 10 years ago or so, and then
SARS outbreak. The thing to remember here is
that most of these are really new.
I'm 61 and almost all of those diseases have either emerged or
reemerged, we've found out about them within my lifetime.
Other than plague and rabies, these are pretty new things, and
that means that these diseases are emerging all the time.
New things are happening. Either it's a part of the
infected organisms that are changing, our environment is
changing, people are changing, but there's lot going on, and,
in fact, about 70% of all the emerging disease, at least in
the last 20 years, have wildlife origins.
So it's something to be aware of and concerned in a general sense
that we know this is the way things are going.
So, should you be concerned about these diseases?
Well, yes and no. So, that gives us a new
opportunity for a new game called Assess That Risk.
[LAUGHTER] Okay, so the categories are,
or actually one category: the disease and the
number of cases in the United States in one year, in 2010.
So, I'll put up the disease, I get three guesses for how many.
Rabies, how many cases of human rabies were there in 2010?
One guess for three. Any other guesses?
Ten. >> Ten.
Okay, so we're not in the hundreds and thousands.
We're in the small numbers. >> Does it count if they had to
get vaccinated for it or they had to go through vaccines?
No, well, we'll talk about that in a moment.
Okay, and we have one guess of 200.
I'm going to give the gentleman over there the bell.
[BELL DINGS] Two.
All right, now this is interesting here.
One of these cases was in Louisiana, the other one was in
Wisconsin. Wisconsin does actually have
quite a history with rabies. In 2004, a young woman in
Milwaukee was bitten by a bat and became the first person to
actually survive rabies after she had developed signs.
And so to go back to your question, yes, if you're
vaccinated, the chances of you getting it, if you get
vaccinated before signs occur, then yes, you have a much better
chance. But this is sort of amazing.
But it's something if you think about that.
Now, if you compare that to the over 4,000 animals, non-human
animals, that were rabid, you can see there's a big
difference. And that's just the animals that
were tested. We have no idea of how many
actually out in the wild have rabies.
So, certainly, in Wisconsin, bats, skunks are an issue for
rabies in Wisconsin. Okay, next guess.
Plague, how many cases of plague?
Zero. >> Zero.
One. >> We got zero, one.
Five. Fifty.
Any others? >> Ten.
Ten. Okay, well we're in that right
ballpark. So...
[BELL DINGS] I'll give you that one too.
Two. Okay?
Both in Oregon. Not Oregon, Wisconsin;
Oregon the state. Both from the same dog or the
same dog's fleas. Okay, two people
in one household. Okay?
So not a big risk. Then we'll move on.
West Nile virus. Any guesses?
Hundreds or thousands or tens. Tens, hundreds, thousands,
let's do it that way. >> Hundreds.
Hundreds, okay. Any other dissenting ideas
out there? >> Ten.
Ten. Okay.
Anybody want to vote for over a thousand?
[INAUDIBLE] We have a vote there?
Okay, good. [BELL DINGS]
All right, so I guess you could say hundreds but we'll give it
to you anyhow. Now, even though that figure is
up there, that's in one year, that's all the people we know
were infected by West Nile Virus, the virus itself.
That doesn't mean all of those people got sick or all of the
people died or there was even a problem.
In fact, it's probably very low. In fact, it's been said that
only 1% of the mosquitoes in a population are actually infected
with West Nile virus, and probably one 1% of the people
who actually get the virus from a mosquito develop a disease.
Not a huge risk. It's there.
Not a huge risk but something you want to take your chances
here? Okay.
And the last one, Lyme disease. Tens, hundreds, thousands?
Thousands. >> Thousands.
Oh, boy, that's pretty definitive.
[BELL DINGS] All right?
So, Lyme disease is the most common tick-borne disease.
And lucky us, here is a map.
This is just produced earlier this year of what your risk for
Lyme disease, and aren't we lucky?
[LAUGHTER] So, what does that mean?
That means take it seriously. Take precautions.
CDC has good information on mosquito repellents and
techniques. Wisconsin Department of Public
Health does as well about how to try to limit your exposure to
Lyme disease because it's out there and it's really in
Wisconsin. >> How does it know to stop at
the border? [LAUGHTER]
That's a good question. If you can tell me that one, I
think there are a lot of people who would like to know that one.
It's called Chicago and the river.
Yeah. >> It looks like Kenosha and
Racine are not affected. >> There's some degree of
modeling in here. These aren't exact figures, and
so it's more for a general sense that here in Wisconsin it's an
issue. So, those are sort of the
relative risks that we talk about.
So you won another Name That Risk game, but what are the
other effects that we should be thinking about here?
So, we talked about what we call public health effects, the
effects of West Nile virus on people, but I was just talking
about the number of cases. If you look at from when West
Nile first appeared in 1999 until last year, over 1200
people died of West Nile virus. So that's not just getting sick.
So it is a serious thing. So just keep that in mind.
But, luckily, what they're seeing now is actually
there's an increase in immunity in sort of population immunity
that a lot of the samples they're testing now actually
have antibodies to West Nile virus without actually people
getting sick. So that means people are
becoming protected. However, it also causes another
problem because if people with a circulating virus are giving
blood, that's another problem. So everything is not hunky-dory.
Where the other thing to realize is that there's an economic
interest in all of this that are somewhat related to public
health. In one study in Louisiana in
2002, in six months it cost the state $20 million.
Not the state, well essentially $20 million in healthcare costs,
both actual clinic costs, lost productivity dealing with the
whole issue. So that's significant for one
state, and you magnify that by 49 more.
Then you have the other angle that West Nile virus also
affects horses. And so there's some reports from
two or three states that were estimating $5 million to $10
million for each one of those states in costs for treatment,
for vaccination, and for dealing with that program, trying to
manage the disease in horses. And so this does add up when you
think about how many different diseases we're looking at.
Okay, and then lastly, but certainly not least, is the
environmental costs. And we've talked about the loss
of animals, population reduction in species numbers which was
significant. And this happens over and over
again, and if I can sort of step away from West Nile virus and
just bring up the idea of white-nose syndrome in bats, the
same question is, we know bats carry rabies so should we worry
about bats from a public health standpoint?
But it's been estimated that bats are worth hundreds of
millions of dollars in agricultural ecological services
as sort of not necessarily that they eat a lot of mosquitoes but
they sort of are very important to the environment.
They eat all sort of insect pests.
And all the insect pests that they eat means there's less
pesticides that have to be used. So all of these things are
interrelated, and so there's a major concern that if our bat
populations go way down, economic costs are going to go
way up in addition to the environmental costs that bats
add. Cave ecologies are almost
dependent on the things that bats bring in.
So, I can keep going, example, example, but it's time to move
on to looking at West Nile virus in general and seeing how you
fit into this big picture of this disease puzzle.
So, in reality, we know that primarily West Nile virus is an
interchange between wild birds and mosquitoes unless you have
those big mosquitoes in your backyard.
But it also has the opportunity to go and infect horses and
infect people. So here, again, is another
choice. How do you want to view this?
Do you want to view this as there's a disease out there, I
have to protect myself. I have to put barriers up for my
horse, for myself. I have to get vaccinated.
I have to vaccinate my animal. I have to put on mosquito
repellant constantly. And all that's a good idea.
I wouldn't say you don't do any of that stuff, but none of these
things are perfect. That reduces your risk, it
doesn't eliminate it. If you think about this as
rather than an us versus them, that that's the problem with
birds out there and I'm not going to worry about it.
It's not okay what's our shared risk here.
And our shared risk is I can get sick.
So if you think about this for an environmental perspective and
you look, you want to study and you want to understand these
relationships, then that can reduce the risk to the whole
community. By understanding what is it
about that cycle and how is the disease transmitted, hopefully
we can eventually get to the point where these things,
probably not disappear, but at least everybody benefits.
And so this idea of understanding the disease
ecology in a large sense it probably a really important way
to move forward in a lot of these things.
One step to understanding how this is knowing how many things
are sick. So how do we monitor health?
Well, this is an easy question if you're a human because most
likely you have friends or relatives who are going to say
are you sick? Or you say, oh, I'm sick.
All right? So that's pretty easy monitoring
right there. If you have a pet, if you're a
farmer and an animal's sick, well, you pretty much have the
same, it's like having a small kid.
They can't talk to you but you can pretty much tell when
they're sick. So both of those have pretty
good monitoring things. So how about for wildlife?
Do we have any rabbit physicians out there?
It's unlikely and, in fact, it's hard, I can't imagine the
raccoons coming up and knocking on your day and saying you got
some Tylenol? It just doesn't happen.
We don't know how, it's a much harder thing to do.
So, it's a big question mark. How do we monitor this?
In reality, it's not that easy. So, how would you recognize a
wildlife disease if you saw it? Well, it might start with one
dead animal, but often it's not usually one.
It usually starts increasing and it usually sort of goes up in a
steep curve to you may have a lot of dead animals.
However, that dead animal, if you remember back to the puzzle,
everybody's looking for food, and for most animals that's
food, that's dinner. And so eventually animals may
disappear and you actually can be back down to only having one
that's out there even though there's a lot more, but how do
we know? Well, how we know is that people
are out there looking and saying, oh, there's something
dead out there. So, without these steps you're
not going to know there's a wildlife disease.
So, if step one there's an animal out there to be seen,
two, there's somebody out there to see it, and then three, what
do you do about it? Do you call somebody?
Do you go online? Do you write somebody a letter?
What's the process here? Well, it's not terribly well
defined at this point. There's no, at least for
wildlife as opposed to humans and animals, we don't have that
same kind of infrastructure. So then the question is, who is
looking for these things? So if you compare those things
between humans and livestock and wildlife, okay, so, for humans,
CDC is a big organization. It's got lots of money, and what
they do is they monitor people's health, and they make
recommendations. They do a great job of providing
information. And they're not just interested
in people, they are interested in both the health of animals as
it affects people. So there is a lot of human
surveillance going on, and sometimes that does involve
animal surveillance as well. If you talk about livestock,
well, the Department of Agriculture, state agriculture
agencies, are really interested in livestock health just because
of the whole economics of the whole thing.
You want to keep your animals healthy because that's people's
livelihoods. So it's a really important thing
to do is to make sure that disease transmission isn't
occurring. However, when we get, whoops,
when we get to wildlife, we're not that clear.
The first two, diseases have to be reported.
There are certain reportable diseases that allow federal and
state and county health departments to identify what's
going on. Same thing for livestock.
There are things that have to be reported so you get a good, big
picture. Well, there are no requirements
to report wildlife diseases, so we really don't have a good
overall integrated system as there is for the other two
groups. So, what does that mean in the
real world? Well, here's a map produced from
CDC data, and, as I mentioned, every county has a health
department, and they have to tell CDC every year how many
people died in that county every year.
So they make these maps showing how many deaths occur in the
counties. Other than that one tiny county
in Texas where I think everybody should want to move to...
[LAUGHTER] Which had no deaths
in over 10 years, I think there's a problem there.
Anyhow, we know that people are dying in the United States.
So that's what this tells you. Big surprise, right?
However, if you try to do the same thing with wildlife, and
these are not deaths per se, these are events that were
reported to the National Wildlife Health Center.
So it's the biggest national view we have, but, as you can
see, there's an awful lot of counties that don't have any
reports. So do you think nothing died
there? It's probably things that died
and there may be data but it may be in local sources, but since
we don't really have a way of bringing that stuff together, we
have a pretty limited picture of what kind of wildlife mortality
occurs in the United States. So since, by and large, agency
priorities aren't going to change because they're
mission-driven, I don't see necessarily the large amounts of
money pouring into the idea of, okay, we need to do better
surveillance of wildlife. But what we can do is we can
tell you that we really need your help in increasing our
level of monitoring for these kinds of things.
And so that leaves you to the largest thing is what you can
do. Yeah?
There it said wildlife events.
Yes. >> How many animals died in
those? >> That's a good question.
The center usually only records things that usually above 5 or
10 animals. Often it's somewhere between 10
and 100, let's say. Okay, so far we've reviewed the
issues of wildlife disease, wildlife health, and our shared
risk of diseases. And hopefully I've convinced you
that this should be important for all of us.
So what can you do? And probably the first thing you
do is make a plan for what you can do.
And here are some suggestions for that plan.
So the first is you can increase your awareness of wildlife
disease and its impacts. Okay, well obviously attending
this session is a good start in that regard, and you can
encourage you friends and neighbors to do that as well.
So, there's all sorts of information out there on
wildlife diseases, what do you use?
Well, you could play another game, but I'm sure I know what
the answers are. They're the usual suspects of
radio, television, newspapers, but certainly blogs, social
media, all sorts of different places that you can get
information. However, as we said earlier, the
media tends to sensationalize, it tends to focus on things.
You may not get the biggest picture of what's going on.
So I would suggest an alternative.
There are different outlets that give you a more comprehensive
picture and more comprehensive information.
And, again, lucky to be in Madison and Wisconsin is three
of these are actually generated right here, the top three.
And, of course, the CDC is always a good source for health
information. And so that way, if you're
really interested, you can get really the on the ground
information about wildlife diseases.
So, the second thing you can do is help us increase the number
of observers. So, as you can see, all of these
different things can be happening.
If we can increase the number of people out there looking, that's
going to give us a better understanding of what's out
there. And this is, in a more formal
sense, this whole idea of people going out and reporting what
they see has been going on for a long time.
So how many bird watchers do we have in the group.
A few. Okay.
So the Audubon Christmas count is a very longstanding effort
for people going out and reporting what they see once a
year. So, all of these activities have
recently been put into the title of citizen science.
And that's essentially the public going out and helping
scientists collect data. And, if you think about it,
untrained people have been contributing to science for a
long time. If you look at Benjamin
Franklin, Charles Darwin, they were essentially not trained
scientists, but they contributed an awful lot to our science
knowledge. And you can do that as well.
There are all sorts of citizen science projects these days.
You can identify galaxies online.
You can report monarch butterfly larvae.
All sorts of different observational data.
And so here's how this can help. So, if a scientist wanted to
know something about wood thrush, a small perching bird,
and in fact you could say that was me because my graduate work
was working on wood thrush. I was only studying it in a
20-acre wood lot. But I was interested, we really
need to know more about population effects, especially
now that there's a real reduction in wood thrush
numbers. And so you have to be able to
look farther than 20 acres. And so what you can do for those
birds, did anybody ever use eBird?
eBird is a program at Cornell Lab of Ornithology that,
essentially, you can go and report your live bird
observations to eBird, and then what they've done if they've
taken those observations, added habitat information, geographic
information, and then come up with these occurrence maps which
hopefully you'll be able to see. Okay, so as you can see, these
birds winter in Mexico and Latin America.
Then as we come to the spring, they all start coming up into
the United States and Canada, and then, in the fall, the
numbers decrease down. So that's pretty astounding that
those data are citizen generated data.
Okay? Pretty impressive.
Now imagine what we could do is if we could overlay information
on dead wood thrush on top of information on live wood thrush
to get a better understanding where some of these population
declines might be happening and potentially what their causes
might be. So, that leads us to the next
slide, which is a tool that has been developed specifically for
that purpose. The wildlife health event
reporter is a simple, quick, and fun way to record observations.
Certainly, you could record live bird observations here, but we'd
be much happier if you told us about dead animals.
So what I'm going to do now is I'm going to turn this over to
Megan to explain about where and how to sign up, how to use it,
and there's laptops out in the lobby that we can help you sign
up for an account, learn how to use it, and then possibly, I
urge you to do this because, who knows, with the late midsummer
day, you might see something on the side of the road on the way
home and you can just jump on and report it.
It will be really cool if there was a big spike in reports
tonight. [LAUGHTER]
And if you're not comfortable with computers or using that,
you can tell your friends, neighbors, relatives about this
and tell them what you learned tonight and get them on board.
So, Megan.
Is this working? >> Here, you want this?
That's okay. Josh, can you switch?
Sorry.
Cool. Thank you very much.
So, yes, my name is Megan Hines, and I'm here working with the
School of Veterinary Medicine. And I will give you a quick
demonstration of the WHER application here.
To create an account, essentially, click here on this
button after visiting www.WHER.org, and just basically
fill in some general information just like signing up for any
other website. And you'll receive an email in
your email inbox that you signed up with here, and it will have a
link for you to click on to confirm your account.
And that's just to make sure that no one else is spoofing
your personal information. And while you're signing up here
for an account, if you'd like to participate, we would urge you
to join this Wednesday Nite at the Lab study group which is a
special project that we're working on with the GHI.
So I will quickly log in and give you a quick tour of how to
make a report.
Okay, so after logging in, clicking on the navigation bar
up on top to report an event will bring you to the main menu.
You can also search, edit reports, and then find some
other helpful links over on the upper right side here.
Essentially some news, ways for you to stay on top of what
reports have been made such as a daily email alert if you're
interested in finding out about what's being reported.
Frequently asked questions, information about mobile
reporting options, and help files, etc.
So, to quickly make a report, click on this report event
from a single location. The first tab is location.
Then you have animals involved and then additional information
and then saving. So, for the first page for
location information we have the date.
So, yesterday I did see a raccoon near my home on the side
of the road, as Josh mentioned. So I will do a rough location
here in this search box. And this is, essentially, to
refocus the map that you're looking at here.
Oops. I'm usually not holding a
microphone. [LAUGHTER]
Can I do that? Can I be the microphone holder?
All right, so after you've put in your search location and
then hit search, the map will re-center itself, as you can see
here. To zoom in and get a better
picture of what you're looking at or, say, see a satellite
image, if you know specifically where it is, you can drag this
pin and, essentially, mark exactly where you were with the
background imagery. The short description of the
event down here on the bottom is basically something to name it
so you can find the record again in your own list of records if
you're interested in locating it.
So I'll just use road kill raccoon.
Next. The next page is adding any
animals involved. If you saw just one species, you
would just add a single species observation.
So, here on the left side, you can pick from a specific species
name if you know of the exact name versus a general name, like
you don't know, it's a duck. You don't know what kind of
duck. Or an animal class name if
you're really not sure. It's a bird, that's all I know.
So here for raccoon. If you start typing a name, as
soon as you get three letters in, it'll display a drop-down
list of possibilities. I'm pretty sure it was a common
raccoon. And if you can't figure out what
you're looking at all, if you just see bones, there's a check
box here down below. And so for the number observed
is, essentially, how many animals of that species were
involved. So whatever you entered or
whatever you observed. So I saw one and it was dead and
there were no sick. And if it was a large amount of
animals and you were estimating, these check boxes down below let
you say that it's an estimate. And then if you did anything
with the animals, which we have a warning here in red, that
means read it, we do not advise you to actually touch the
animals. And so what I would suggest is
left untouched. And then the condition of the
animal. And why we're interested in this
information is if this is something of interest to, say,
the Wisconsin DNR or to the USGS National Wildlife Health Center,
they might want to know was the carcass fresh, could we go back
and retrieve it. So that's kind of what that
information is for. And then if you took a photo,
you could upload a photograph here and give it a name.
But I'm just going to hit save and continue.
And so if you saw other animals, say there were robins and
raccoons or something like that, you could continue to add
animals here. I'm just going to hit next.
The next page is essentially some comments about where the
observation occurred, if you had any comments about that, and
then gives you an opportunity to upload photos of the
environment. So if you had pictures of the
park where the animal was, you can include pictures there as
well. And then if you made any agency
contacts about this observation, say you called the DNR or you
called the National Wildlife Health Center about it, you
could make a note here. These are all optional fields
that I just showed you, so I'll skip them.
The last page is just a review of everything that you've typed
in. You can get a little overview,
and, if you're satisfied, you hit the green button to submit.
If there's something else you wanted to add later, say you had
a picture on your phone and you had to go download it or
something like that, you could hit save unsubmitted and then
come back later and add the picture and submit the report.
So after you submit the report, depending on where you are,
you'll see a message that the state or federal agency has
given us to share with the general public, and in this
instance, because we're in Wisconsin, we have a message
from the Wisconsin DNR. And so I would like to introduce
Nancy, who's joining us today from the DNR.
And I can show you, essentially, or she can tell you,
essentially, what the Wisconsin DNR is interested in learning
about.
Thanks, Megan. Basically, the message says that
the DNR has a wildlife health program and in certain
situations or for certain species we are interested in
hearing about those directly so that we can make a judgment as
to whether or not we would like to follow up and try to retrieve
that carcass quickly before it either decomposes or scavengers
get it and do some diagnostic testing on it to try and figure
out why it did die. And so you'll get that message
in your email, and it gives you a link to click to go to the
homepage that's shown here. And if you type in the, you want
to do that for me, Megan, it says this in the email message,
type in wildlife health in the search bar there, it'll take you
directly to the wildlife health web page from the DNR.
And right there will be the information.
This can change periodically, so the most current information
will be listed there. Most of the time, the things
that we'll be most interested in in terms of situations will be
what we call die-offs which I think Josh mentioned.
We normally kind of think of as five or more sick or dead
wildlife in one area or over a short time frame.
That's usually kind of unusual, and so most of the time our
program is going to have an interest in trying to retrieve
carcasses if there are still some available and try to sort
out what's going on there. There are also a list of species
on the right-hand side there where we have disease
surveillance programs specifically.
And so we're interested, like if you see a single dead loon,
we're interested in hearing about that directly, again so
that we can try to retrieve the carcass because we're trying to
document what is going on with the loon populations.
But to do that we need to get the reports right away so that
we have the chance to get out there and get those carcasses.
So in there where it's underlined and highlighted, it
says contact your local DNR office, if you click on that, it
will take you to another page where you can search for the
closest DNR office and it will give you contacts.
So you can search by city/county or you can get a list of the
service centers and it will give you information on address,
phone numbers, and hours of operations.
So, if you just want to take a look at that, we appreciate your
help with that as well. And just to finish up, the group
kind of thought that it would be good if we just gave you a real
world example of what can happen with some of these citizen
reports and what the end result can be.
So, I'm afraid I've got to read my example.
I just need to be able to see it.
So this real world example is meant to show you the importance
of sharing your observations of sick and dead wildlife.
So this was taken directly out of our wildlife health database
at the DNR. In December 2005, we had a
citizen report it to his local DNR office that he was finding
several dead Pine Siskins in his backyard in Vilas County.
The dead birds were collected and sent to the DNR's wildlife
health program for testing. At the same time, another
citizen in Marinette County reported three dead Siskins and
two dead gold finches in her backyard.
These were also collected and submitted for testing.
Testing showed that these birds died from a salmonella
infection. As other citizens reported their
observations, the final picture for this event showed that birds
from a 10-county area from Iron County to Brown County were
affected. Now, as most of you know, people
and even pets can get salmonella.
So thanks to the observations and reports of people like you,
we were able to get carcasses collected right away that were
fresh enough to test. Once the tests confirmed that
the birds were dying of salmonella, we were able to get
information out to the public to make them aware of the situation
and were also able to provide the public with information on
how to protect not only the wild birds in their backyard, but
also how to protect themselves and their pets from getting
infected. So, hopefully this example
illustrates that your observations and reporting your
observations are very important to wildlife, to people health,
and to pets. Thank you.
[APPLAUSE]