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Rosalind Philips
rosalind at starlingconsulting.com
Olympia, WA

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West Nile Side Effect: A Wealth of Data on Wildlife Death
http://www.nytimes.com/2000/11/27/nyregion/27WILD.html

November 27, 2000

By KIRK JOHNSON

DELMAR, N.Y. What's killing the mourning doves of New York?

Until this year, that was a question that no one had even thought
to ask, because no one knew that a scourge was stalking the dove
population. Their struggle, like much death in the wild, was silent
and offstage, in the woods and fields, where bodies quickly
disappear and biologists are usually not on hand to take notes.

But examinations of the 9,000-odd bird carcasses and 1,000 mammals
and amphibians that were delivered this year to the state wildlife
pathology lab here in response to the outbreak of West Nile virus
changed all that. The corpses, from hummingbirds and loons to bats
and mourning doves and even a few bears, arrived like a daily tide
as public health officials around the state scrambled to
investigate the unknown sources and transmission patterns of the
virus, which emerged in the New York City region in the summer of
1999.

And while testing for West Nile remained the top priority, said
Ward B. Stone, the wildlife pathologist who directs the lab, new
questions and clues kept piling up, too, along with the bodies. The
result was a purely accidental scientific payoff from the emergence
of West Nile a vast new database of wildlife death.

Mr. Stone's lab, nestled in a rural region near Albany, has become
one of the nodes, scientists say, of a swirling national confluence
of disciplines from climatology to epidemiology that is drawing
a tighter and tighter connection between human health and the state
of the natural world.

"Ward's lab is unique," said Linda Glaser, a wildlife disease
specialist at the National Wildlife Health Center in Madison, Wis.
She said Mr. Stone was finding out more about what was killing
wildlife than anybody else in the United States. "It's pretty
amazing."

Most of the mourning doves did not die from the West Nile virus,
the lab found, but rather from a protozoan parasite causing
trichomoniasis, which caused lesions in the birds' throats. The
disease cannot be transmitted from birds to humans, but it is
deadly to doves. Other tests have turned up a dissertation's worth
of avian ills, from fatal fungi to gastrointestinal tapeworm to
what Mr. Stone says is a substantial number of deliberate
poisonings that the state would never have known about without the
flood of specimens sent in for testing for the West Nile virus.

But what the examinations did not turn up is probably as revealing
as what they did: in all the huge volume of specimens this year,
relatively few animals, the lab found, died from accidental
pesticide exposure. The great specter that has haunted the
naturalist/environmental movement since at least the 1960's, when
Rachel Carson published her polemic against agricultural toxins,
"Silent Spring," is waning, Mr. Stone said.

Most of the small number of birds that were killed by manufactured
poisons, he said, either ingested a chemical that is no longer in
use but is still in the ecosystem, like chlordane, or ate poison
recently set out by humans. A flock of dead gulls found near a
landfill in Cortland, for example, was initially thought to have
been killed by West Nile; it turned out the gulls had been fed an
obscure poison laced into bread.

"We're moving from a phase when pesticides like DDT and chlordane
were the great threats to wildlife into a time when exotic diseases
are becoming more and more important," Mr. Stone said. On the other
hand, he said, some maladies that are turning up, like
trichomoniasis, may have been killing mourning doves for years,
perhaps even centuries, and no one knew. "And we still wouldn't
know it if we weren't hooked up with the Health Department and
getting this volume of birds," he said.

Other scientists say that New York's lab though it was not
created for the purpose of tracking West Nile has provided a
major, fortuitous link in the chain of disease investigation. A
recent discovery here that bats are susceptible to West Nile, for
example, has already filtered through the research world, prompting
wildlife officials in New Jersey and other states to expand their
testing and open their freezers to test old samples. Most states
that have begun testing animals since the West Nile outbreak, which
killed seven people last year and sickened dozens, still test only
for West Nile.

"New York is unusual because the program is set up to look for
trends in wildlife diseases few other states put any money into
that," said Tom French, the assistant director of the Massachusetts
Division of Fisheries and Wildlife.

But for all its clout and reputation, the pathology lab is neither
large nor plush. It has a staff of five, including two technicians
who were hired this year to do nothing but bird necropsies to test
for West Nile. It has banks of freezers for storage, and perhaps
most important, its own specially built high-temperature crematory
to dispose of biohazard organisms.

Before West Nile crowded its agenda, the lab worked on diseases
like rabies and Lyme disease, and on issues like lead poisoning in
waterfowl that accidentally ate lead sinkers lost by fishermen.

Inside the lab, nature and death and technology are intertwined.
Rows of animal skulls, from wolves to field mice, line the display
cases. Student interns sit in front of computer screens, entering
data, while in the basement, technicians in head-to- toe protective
gear dissect birds, calling out their findings about the relative
condition of spleens and livers and hearts and brains to assistants
with clipboards.

But researchers in other states say that all the public and
government focus on West Nile and the volume of birds being turned
in for examination throughout the Northeast have created scientific
bonuses outside New York, as well. Wildlife investigators in New
Jersey, for example, are now conducting what they say may be the
largest-ever study in the nation about the lingering effects of
chlordane.

The chemical was banned in the late 1980's, but scientists and
environmentalists have long maintained that because of its
persistence it can remain toxic in the soil for decades after its
application chlordane is probably still a factor in the
ecosystem, passing from soil to insects to birds that eat insects
and into birds that eat other birds.

The New Jersey study, which looks at predatory species like hawks
and falcons, had already been planned for this year, with perhaps a
tiny sample and a big hypothesis, said Dr. Douglas E. Roscoe, the
supervisor of the office of fish and wildlife health and forensics
at the New Jersey Division of Fish and Wildlife. The bounty of dead
raptors that began arriving this summer for West Nile testing
more than 70 hawks and falcons alone created a broad sampling
that he could have only dreamed of, he said.

Many other scientists say the biggest long-term impact on science
from the emergence of the West Nile virus could result from the
cross- fertilization of disciplines that it is bringing about.
Because West Nile involves a kind of biological Where's Waldo of
birds, mosquitoes, humans and other mammals, a new dialogue is
beginning to emerge between specialists who have in many instances
had little to say to one another. Doctors and public health
administrators are talking to wildlife biologists; veterinarians
are talking to ecologists who study the evolving disease patterns
caused by climate change and global warming.

Even pet shop owners and animal importers have become involved, as
investigators pursue the theory that the virus entered the United
States in the blood of an imported bird that was then bitten by a
mosquito that flew off to infect other birds.

"There's a ton of stuff out there that we're only in the primitive
stages of understanding," said Mark Pokras, the director of the
wildlife clinic at the Tufts University School of Veterinary
Medicine in Medford, Mass., which formed a consortium two years ago
with the Harvard Medical School and the Wildlife Trust, a private
conservation group, to study emerging diseases. "People are seeing
the need to bring more expertise to bear because they realize that
no area of the profession has a lock on the information."

Some of this scientific exchange had already been developing in
places like Tufts as a result of other diseases and viruses that
connect humans and animals, like the hantavirus, with its
connection to rodents; Lyme disease, with its links to ticks and
deer; and H.I.V., which has been traced to monkeys. West Nile is
different, researchers say, because it is concentrated in the most
densely populated region of North America and because, unlike those
viruses and diseases, it also poses a grave danger to wildlife.

"West Nile will be the real catalyst" of interdisciplinary
cooperation, said Dr. Paul R. Epstein, the associate director of
the Center for Health and Global Environment at Harvard Medical
School. "It's getting veterinarians and doctors and biologists to
sit down at the same table."

West Nile has become quiescent now, as cold weather has killed the
mosquitoes that carry the virus. But that has meant only a shifting
of the gears at the pathology lab, not really a rest. Blood smears
and tissue samples that were put on ice during the hectic days of
summer will be analyzed through the winter. An expansion of the lab
to double its space for animal autopsies next year is also in the
planning stage.

And there are always new mysteries to solve. Loons have been
washing up on the shores of Lake Erie recently, killed by botulism.
Mr. Stone's hypothesis is that heavier- than-normal precipitation
flushed local sewage systems into the lake, and that from there
toxins passed into the tissues of zebra mussels and fish, and from
there into the birds.

Human beings who hunt and eat waterfowl from the lake are the next
link in the chain, but Mr. Stone said a little home-economics
science is all that is needed to keep the disease from spreading to
humans: people should cook anything from the wild completely before
they eat it.



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