This Oct. 13, 2014, photo released via Twitter by the City of Dallas Public Information Managing Director Sana Syed shows Bentley in Dallas, the one-year-old King Charles Spaniel belonging to Nina Pham, the nurse who contracted Ebola. Sana Syed / PIO City of Dallas / AP
Editors’ note: This is the second part of series on how to tackle infectious disease outbreaks from doctors at the Mayo Clinic.
Bentley, the dog belonging to the first person to have caught Ebola within the United States, is in quarantine at a naval base. Last week, Spain killed a dog that may have been exposed to Ebola. Though this was undertaken in an abundance of caution, it is a stark reminder of the crucial role animals can and do play in the spread of disease.
Scientists know that around 60 percent of human pathogens have an animal origin. But, until recently, they knew very little about which sorts of animals from which many of these diseases originated. Now, there’s a strong sense that HIV came from chimps, SARS came from bats, and MERS came from camels. Fruit bats are considered the most likely host of the deadly Ebola virus.
Though wild animals may be the first place a disease appears, they can transfer them to domestic animals that live among us. As Professor Matthew Baylis of the University of Liverpool, said: “Domestic animals act like reservoirs for a range of diseases, many of which originally came from wild animals.”
Dr. Craig Rowles stands with hogs in one of his Carroll, Iowa, hog buildings on July 9, 2009. The farmer and longtime veterinarian did all he could to prevent porcine epidemic diarrhea from spreading to his farm, but despite his best efforts the deadly diarrhea attacked in November 2013, killing 13,000 animals in a matter of weeks. PED, a virus never before seen in the U.S. killed millions of pigs in less than a year, and with little known about how it spreads or how to stop it, it’s threatening pork production and pushing up prices by 10 percent or more. Charlie Neibergall / AP File
To make the world more safe and secure from infectious disease, we must be vigilant about outbreaks in animals, too.
The micro economic impact of the link between animals and human disease is profound. In many countries, a single cow (providing a family with either sustenance or income) means the difference between life and death.
The macro economic impact is equally striking: Consumers are paying nearly 13 percent more for pork at the supermarket than they were this time last year—partially because of a deadly pig virus, which has killed millions of piglets over the past 12 months. The disease threatens our food supply, as well as farmers’ livelihoods; indeed, many hog producers are worried about how to keep their farms immune from a disease that has no proven cure.
A bat disease, which has killed an estimated 6 million bats in the eastern United States and Canada since 2007, is another case in point. The diminishing number of bats is a problem, because bats eat mosquitoes. If we have fewer bats, there’s a real possibility that we’ll have more mosquitoes carrying their own set of diseases.
In this Oct. 2008 photo provided by the New York Department of Environmental Conservation is a little brown bat with fungus on its nose in New York. Michigan and Wisconsin wildlife officials said Thursday, April 10, 2104 that tests have confirmed the presence of the fungus that causes white-nose syndrome, which has killed millions of bats in the U.S. and Canada. The disease has now been confirmed in 25 states following the April announcements in Michigan and Wisconsin. Ryan von Linden / AP
As should be clear by now, stopping infectious disease with a rapid and effective response to prevent a true global epidemic should be a major priority on just about every continent. The key take-away from the connection between animals and disease is that we must have vaccines for diseases that are both animal and human targeted.
Beyond that, we must also develop and implement technology that is adaptable, fast, dynamic and universally applicable.
Second, we need to continue to gain more understanding about the organisms that cause disease and how they mutate, as well as spread. And this should be done regardless of whether there is a commercial value.
Third, we need to have production capabilities—across the vaccine development continuum—that are ready to roll to test proof of concept at a moment’s notice.
Fourth, we must continue to find ways to pull the best and brightest together; it will take a multitude of different scientific disciplines to tackle these diseases of global importance.
To put it simply—and bluntly—we must do everything in our power to keep the dogs of global disease at bay.
We must do this figuratively—and literally.
About the Authors:
Franklyn G. Prendergast, M.D., Ph.D, is a member of IDRI’s Board of Directors. He is also the
Edmond and Marion Guggenheim Professor of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology and Professor of Molecular Pharmacology and Experimental Therapeutics at the Mayo Medical School.
Steven G. Reed, Ph.D., is the Founder, President & Chief Scientific Officer at IDRI. His research interests have focused on the immunology of intracellular infections and the development of vaccines and diagnostics for infectious diseases. He led the team that, together with GSK, developed the first defined tuberculosis vaccine to advance to clinical trials, as well as a more recent second generation TB vaccine candidate and the first defined vaccines for leishmaniasis, as well as the K39-based diagnostic tests currently licensed for leishmaniasis.
Darrick Carter, Ph.D, is the Vice President of Adjuvant Technology at IDRI. His work centers on new immunomodulatory agents and formulations, as well as the process development necessary to take vaccines and therapeutic candidates from the lab to the clinic.
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