Biology Reference
In-Depth Information
Reston virus infection (Normile,
2009
). The reservoir of Ebola Reston virus is
still unknown, but it appears that long-tailed macaques are not the natural res-
ervoir for this pathogen.
Human-to-primate transmission
As pointed out in the above sections, although much is known about physi-
ology and disease in laboratory macaques which have been used as bio-
medical models for human disease, relatively little is known about how
human pathogens may impact free-ranging macaque populations, including
M. fascicularis
. Scattered anecdotal reports hint at die-offs that could be
attributed to outbreaks of infectious disease in long-tailed macaque popula-
tions, however, there are virtually no studies that have verified that human
infectious agents are the culprit. In general, obstacles to research on die-
offs in free-ranging macaque populations include logistical difficulty of the
research (i.e., population-level baseline serological data prior to infectious
agent exposures) and the difficulty in funding these studies on long-tailed
macaques, considered by some as a nuisance, or “weed” species (Richards,
et al
.,1989). Below we consider several endemic human pathogens that have
been shown experimentally to infect and in some cases cause disease in
long-tailed macaques.
Tuberculosis
Globally, tuberculosis is one of the most significant infectious threats to human
populations. It is estimated that one-third of all humans living are infected with
Mycobacteria tuberculosis
(TB), the organism that causes most human disease
(Jasmer
et al
.,
2002
). Of these 2 billion individuals, most have inactive (i.e.,
latent) infections, but an estimated 13.7 million have chronic active disease,
and 1.8 million people die from TB every year, most of these in the developing
world (WHO,
2009
). The increasing global burden of the disease, its syner-
gistic action with HIV and the growing problem of drug-resistant TB have
spurred interest in studying TB in the laboratory, where long-tailed macaques
have become a favored model for studying the disease (Flynn
et al
.,
2003
).
Research on experimentally infected
M. fascicularis
shows that, given experi-
mental innocula as small as 25colony-forming units, long-tailed macaques
show a broad range of response, from latent disease to chronic active dis-
ease (Capuano, III
et al
.,
2003
). This wide range of disease parallels that seen
with human TB infection, and makes this species of macaque well-suited as a
