Animal database alerts to disease outbreak, bioterrorism
Published: November 21, 2005
THAT gentle Lab sleeping blissfully at your feet, those two tabbies grooming each other on the sofa: They could be unlikely recruits to the war on terrorism. Under a new surveillance system developed at Purdue University, pets may provide early warning of an impending epidemic of dangerous diseases such as SARS or avian flu — or even alert us to a bioterror threat. [When Every Moment Counts: What You Need to Know About Bioterrorism from the Senate’s Only Doctor]
That’s the intent, at least, of the Purdue program, which uses the computerized database of a nationwide chain of veterinary hospitals to spot disease outbreaks. The rationale: Dogs and cats share a home environment with their owners and are exposed to the same germs. But the pets have a faster metabolism, so they will exhibit disease symptoms sooner than humans. This makes them excellent sentinels for certain so-called zoonotic illnesses — ones that can spread from animals to humans.
And that’s a lot of diseases. Between 65% and 75% of human infections, including SARS, influenza and Lyme disease, originate in animals. [Twenty-First Century Plague : The Story of SARS]
“The issue of emerging zoonotic diseases is huge,” says Dominic Travis, a veterinary epidemiologist at Chicago’s Lincoln Park Zoo who helped launch the Zoo Network, which is a similar surveillance system for wild animals in captivity. “This database is a great resource.”
The National Companion Animal Surveillance Network, as it’s called, is the brainchild of Larry Glickman, a veterinary epidemiologist at Purdue University in West Lafayette, Ind.
“We don’t know where the next disease is coming from, but it’s likely to start in animals,” says Glickman. “The exchange of pets across continents is now so great that the opportunity for transmission is tremendous. If we can detect a bacterium or virus that is causing diseases in animals, we could terminate the problem before it jumps to humans.”
But, Glickman adds, “to do that we have to be able to monitor clinical signs in animals and know that something had changed, and quickly identify what triggered the change.”
The network Glickman created is designed with this in mind. It taps into data from the Banfield pet hospital chain, which is headquartered in Portland, Ore., and has 500 facilities in 44 states.
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