Wildlife Diseases: Stopping Them in Their Tracks

HIV-AIDS. West Nile virus. SARS. What do all these headline-making diseases have in common? They are all zoonoses, diseases that are transmitted from animals to humans. In fact, about 70 percent of the world's new and newly important human diseases of the past 50-years have originated in wild animals.

Zoonoses have a major impact not just on human health but on agriculture and biodiversity too. Many wildlife diseases infect agricultural animals. And they cost Canada's and the world's economies billions of dollars.

With this in mind, the Government of Canada has identified wildlife diseases as one of its top priorities for integrated science and technology.

The cornerstone of this approach is the National Wildlife Disease Strategy being developed by Environment Canada in partnership with other departments and agencies. The strategy is designed to identify and stop the spread of wildlife diseases before they cause severe health and economic effects.

This requires a new level of integration from forest and field to food processing plant and hospital. It brings together wildlife biologists, veterinarians and physicians as never before.

How is this done? One of Canada’s frontlines of defence against zoonoses is the Canadian Cooperative Wildlife Health Centre. Created in 1992 as the first step in collaborative management of wildlife diseases in Canada, the CCWHC is a partnership of federal, provincial and territorial governments and non-governmental organizations with Canada’s four veterinary colleges.

The CCWHC and its partner agencies conduct prevention, monitoring and research activities across Canada, and beyond our borders. For example, with Health Canada the CCWHC maintains an online real-time surveillance program for West Nile disease, and works with Fisheries and Oceans Canada to study marine animal disease outbreaks.

The Canadian Food Inspection Agency’s Animal Disease Surveillance Unit is on the lookout for farm animal disease outbreaks in Canada, such as the summer 2004 outbreak of Avian Influenza among chickens in British Columbia’s Fraser Valley. It also monitors agricultural diseases worldwide to prevent their entry into Canada.

Individual Canadians are also playing a key role in wildlife disease surveillance. For example, in Saskatchewan the monitoring of Chronic Wasting Disease, a fatal brain disease in deer, involves deer tissue supplied by hunters.