Siempre creí que podíamos contra todo. Somos héroes, o eso creía, pero no esperaba que algo nos sobrepasara tanto, al punto que sentí que se
Siempre creí que podíamos contra todo. Somos héroes, o eso creía, pero no esperaba que algo nos sobrepasara tanto, al punto que sentí que se me escapaba de las manos.
Nuevo fanfic... Probablemente me demoré demasiado en este, principalmente porque "Lazos Inquebrantables" no termina aún. Me gustaría jugar el juego con mis manos para tener más idea del espacio ambiental del juego. Además, la universidad me tiene con soga al cuello, jajaja. Pero lo bueno es que la universidad me dio la idea de este fanfic, así que no puedo odiarla. Además, esta me dará de comer en unos años.
"Lazos Inquebrantables" le queda poco, lo que me rompe el corazón. Creí que me daría para más, pero prefiero no extenderla y perder la idea original, porque, como mencioné en su momento, solo empezó como una broma entre mi esquizofrenia y yo. Al menos le veo tres capítulos más y una historia alternativa un poco más oscura. (Gracias por el apoyó, no saben lo feliz que me hace leer sus comentarios)
Infectious disease, captive animals, and the Endangered Species Act
There's been a really interesting development in how the Endangered Species Act relates to captive animals in the United States. I picked up on it last fall and spent most of the early part of this year writing a paper about what happened and what implications it might have in the future - but what I didn't expect was to proved right within a month!
Basically, two different lower court judges have ruled recently that exposing captive endangered animals to an increased risk of infectious disease is a violation of the Endangered Species Act. They don’t actually have to get sick - just the fact that the risk wasn’t prevented qualifies. This has super huge implications for zoos and sanctuaries and anywhere else with an endangered species collection. Both lawsuits (one about a lemur, and one about some of the tiger king lions) resulted in major consequences: the lemurs were seized, and since the lions had already been removed prior to that lawsuit, the guy involved got hit with major penalties and prohibitions for the future.
Where I think this potentially creates the most immediate issue is, of course, SARS-CoV-2. Most zoological facilities are ending their requirements for staff to mask and socially distance around susceptible species (and holy heck, I was not aware how many species can get sick from it). This is especially a huge concern for big cats, since they seem to be the most at risk. The ESA lawsuit from 2020, against Jeff Lowe for his treatment of lion cubs, specifically notes that it was a violation for him to not follow “generally accepted” risk mitigation procedures, specifically, not masking and not distancing. So does that mean that zoos and sanctuaries that are having staff stop masking around tigers and lions and snow leopards are violating the ESA? We don’t know for sure, but it’s entirely possible.
The reason we don’t know is that the scope of the ESA is being changed by the interpretation of the courts. Rather than getting amendments passed, or having FWS choose to consider certain things violations, these judges are basically ruling on what they see as a violation of their understanding of the law. And those precedents can have some pretty serious impacts. Other judges aren’t required to rule the same way on similar topics (as long as they’re not in the same district, and a lower court, than the original ruling) but they often take previous precedents on the topic into pretty serious consideration. So for example, the argument that not masking around the lions was based on a precedent from the previous case, where it was ruled that having a lemur living in a situation that made it more likely to get sick was also a violation. So in the next case, courts could choose to agree with the lion and lemur precedents - or not - and we don’t know for sure until it’s litigated. Sigh.
But here’s the thing: there’s plenty of other zoonotic diseases that captive animals have to be protected from. I wrote my paper originally about SARS-CoV-2, but noted at the end that “While SARS-CoV-2 was the zoonotic disease risk during the [lion] court case, it is important to recognize that the ESA violations identified by the courts in that lawsuit and in [the lemur court case] were on the topic of increased or unmitigated disease risk more generally. This new scope of the ESA captive take provision may be relevant to other circulating zoonotic pathogens; for instance, the H5N1 strain of avian influenza has recently proven to be fatal to tigers, mustelids, and some marine mammal species.” I realized after publication that it could be argued that EEHV - the really deadly elephant hemorrhagic herpes virus - might also fall under the scope of these rulings.
And surprise! A couple days ago, it made the news that the Noah’s Ark Animal Sanctuary in Georgia was told to change their practices or be sued for violating the ESA. Some of the allegations? That the facility “failed to prevent tigers and a lion from exposure to the potentially deadly Avian Influenza virus.” I expected to see additional claims in ESA lawsuits about infectious disease risk - I just didn’t expect to see them so quickly after I published a big project warning about the possibility.
I don’t have a sense of where this issue will continue to go from here, as each additional court decisions changes how the precedent might have impacts. But I do think it’s going to be important to pay attention to, and might have pretty big impacts on how facilities handle zoonotic disease moving forwards.
A link to the full 13-page paper on the legal precedents - and my concerns about the impact of ending SARS-CoV-2 precautions around endangered animals - is below.
A potentially fatal disease caused by the spores of the bacterium Bacillus anthracis, anthrax is often discussed for its potential as a sinister biological weapon. Yet typical infection routes are more mundane, through contact with contaminated water, soil, or infected animals. In particular, herbivores like cattle can ingest naturally-occurring spores in soil while grazing. Vaccines provide effective protection against infection, but spores can remain dormant in soil for several years, so livestock should be regularly vaccinated wherever anthrax was once present. In northern Vietnam, where domesticated water buffalo (Bubalus bubalis, pictured) are major hosts for B. anthracis, recent records show substantial overlap between anthrax cases in humans and livestock, while virtually all cases with sufficient information involved contact with sick or dead animals, or meat. More happily, fewer human cases were reported when livestock vaccination rates were high, demonstrating the importance of vaccination for protecting animals, humans and their livelihoods.
Written by Emmanuelle Briolat
Image by Jason K. Blackburn, Spatial Epidemiology and Ecology Research Laboratory (SEER Lab), University of Florida, Gainesville,FL, USA
and research by Luong Minh Tan, Doan Ngoc Hung et al JK Blackburn lab & Provincial Center for Disease Control, Dien Bien Phu City, Dien Bien, Vietnam
Image copyright held by Jason K Blackburn
Published in PLOS Neglected Tropical Diseases, December 2022
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Foot and Mouth Disease (FMD) has never been zoonotic. Animals/herds with the disease are depopulated (euthanized en masse) simply because it is a highly contagious and severe disease and has a huge impact on livestock species which are important for food production.
What do you get when you put animals in tight, close quarters, filthy and disgusting cages, and then eat those animals?....Pandemics. You get pandemics. All this suffering brought to you by humans being jerks to animals.
“ To understand why some outbreaks of viral disease go big, others go really big, and still others sputter intermittently or pass away without causing devastation, consider two aspects of a virus in action: transmissibility and virulence. These are crucial parameters, defining and fateful, like speed and mass. Along with a few other factors, they largely determine the gross impact of any outbreak. Neither of the two is an absolute constant; they vary, they’re relative. They reflect the connectedness of a virus to its host and its wider world. They measure situations, not just microbes. Transmissibility and virulence: the yin and yang of viral ecology.
You’ve heard a bit already about transmissibility, including the simple statement that viral survival demands replication and transmission. Replication can occur only within cells of a host, for the reasons I’ve mentioned. Transmission is travel from one host to another, and transmissibility is the packet of attributes for achieving it. Can the virions [=individual viral units, particles, standing intact outside a cell] concentrate themselves in a host’s throat or nasal passages, cause irritation there, and come blasting out on the force of a cough or a sneeze? Once launched into the environment, can they resist desiccation and ultraviolet light for at least a few minutes? Can they invade a new individual by settling onto other mucous membranes—in the nostrils, in the throat, in the eyes—and gaining attachment, cell entry, another round of replication? If so, that virus is highly transmissible. It goes airborne from one host to another.
Fortunately, not every virus can do that. If HIV-1 could, you and I might already be dead. If the rabies virus could, it would be the most horrific pathogen on the planet. The influenzas are well adapted for airborne transmission, which is why a new strain can circle the world within days. The SARS virus travels this route too, or anyway by the respiratory droplets of sneezes and coughs—hanging in the air of a hotel corridor, moving through the cabin of an airplane—and that capacity, combined with its case fatality rate of almost 10 percent, is what made it so scary in 2003 to the people who understood it best. But other viruses employ other means of transmission, each with its own advantages and limitations. “
David Quammen, Spillover: Animal Infections and the Next Human Pandemic; W. W. Norton, 2012 [ eBook ]
