Monday, May 14, 2012

Emerging disease threat to proboscis monkey


KOTA KINABALU: Sabah Wildlife Department (SWD), Danau Girang Field Centre (DGFC) and EcoHealth Alliance (EHA) recently organised a one-day training workshop on zoonotic diseases, or diseases transmitted between wildlife and humans, at Lok Kawi Wildlife Park.

Staff from SWD Wildlife Rescue Unit (WRU), DGFC, WWF and the Institute for Tropical Biology and Conservation, Universiti Malaysia Sabah, attended the training provided by EHA.

“We recently started a collaboration with the EcoHealth Alliance and the PREDICT programme on emerging diseases, funded by the United States Agency for International Development (USAID),” explained Dr Laurentius Ambu, director of SWD.

The PREDICT project is a component of the USAID-funded Emerging Pandemic Threats program, which works globally to pre-empt and combat diseases that could spark future pandemics.

“Emerging diseases are very important to consider because wildlife and people get closer and closer due to habitat loss and degradation. Diseases are driven by stressed ecosystems, expanding human populations and fractured natural habitats, something more and more common in our environment,” added Ambu.

“The objective of PREDICT is to build a global early warning system for emerging diseases that move between wildlife and people,” explained Tom Hughes, project coordinator for EHA in Malaysia.

“Zoonotic pathogens often don’t cause disease in natural hosts, it is therefore very important to conduct surveillance of ‘healthy’ animals. This is what we are starting in Sabah in collaboration with the Sabah Wildlife Department, Danau Girang Field Centre and other institutions such as Universiti Malaysia Sabah and the NGO HUTAN,” said Hughes.

“It¡¯s important to remember that most animal viruses spill over into human populations because of our own activities that bring us into closer contact with wildlife,¡± added Hughes.

“One of our goals with PREDICT is to identify which viruses in wildlife are most likely to infect people, which human activities bring people into contact with wildlife in a way that increases risk of disease transmission and work with our partners to reduce the risk of people and wildlife coming into contact, so that these viruses never make the leap into human populations", he added.

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