The Consortium for Conservation Medicine announces an award of $1.4 million from the Fogarty International Center, National Institutes of Health.
The award will fund 4 years of research on a group of viruses that recently emerged in South East Asia and Australia, causing the death of over 150 people.
The viruses, known as Hendra virus and Nipah virus, are carried by fruit bats and move into human populations via domestic animals, pigs and horses kept in farms within fruit bat habitat.
The team will investigate how changes to the environment have increased contact between fruit bats, domestic animals and humans. It is thought that deforestation, fire-burning, encroaching agriculture and other changes have driven fruit bats to seek food in areas closer to human habitation.
“These viruses have only recently been discovered and are highly lethal”, says Dr Peter Daszak, Executive Director of the Consortium for Conservation Medicine. “We will examine how human changes to fruit bat habitat drive them closer to towns in Malaysia and Australia. Once we work out how they emerge, we’ll propose measures to prevent it in future”. He adds: “we believe the answer will lie in preventing transmission to domestic animals, while continuing to conserve these endangered bats.”
The research will be conducted by teams in the USA, Australia, England and Malaysia. Dr Alex Hyatt, a virologist at the Australian Animal Health Lab (CSIRO) will coordinate diagnostic test kit development: “We aim to improve the diagnostic assays for detecting these viruses. These will be made available to researchers around the world, aiding surveillance programs,” Dr Hyatt says.
Dr Hume Field, of Queensland Department of Primary Industries will coordinate ecological studies in Australia and Malaysia. He comments “We are dealing with the unknown, complex impacts of human alterations to wildlife habitat. It is our job to unravel this complexity and work out how these viruses emerged.
This research is funded by a new program of the Fogarty International Center, National Institutes of Health called the “Ecology of Infectious Diseases” initiative. This program addresses a need for fundamental research on how pathogens move through populations in a changing environment.
Dr Daszak says “this is an exciting opportunity to work on a new approach to public health. In this research, we get to the real origin of emerging diseases – environmental changes that cause them to jump from wildlife to humans.”
To learn more about Nipah virus:
http://www.csiro.au/index.asp?type=faq&id=Nipahvirus&stylesheet=divisionFaq
To learn more about Hendra virus:
http://www.csiro.au/index.asp?type=faq&id=HendraVirus&stylesheet=divisionFaq
http://www.csiro.au/reports/Hendra2000/index.htm
The Consortium for Conservation Medicine is a collaborative institution based at the Lamont-Doherty campus of Columbia University 25 minutes north of New York City that links
The CCM strives to understand the link between anthropogenic environmental change, health of all species and the conservation of biodiversity. We conduct collaborative scientific research in these fields and use the outcomes to inform policy, develop curricula and formulate practical solutions to environmental threats that affect these links. Through these activities we are defining the field of conservation medicine.
To learn more about the CCM and the field of conservation medicine, visit our website at http://www.conservationmedicine.org
To learn about conservation of fruit bats and other bat species:
Bat Conservation International, Inc. protects and restores bats and their habitats worldwide through research, education and conservation - http://www.batcon.org