Biology Reference
In-Depth Information
5.4.2 Creation of the System .................................................................. 110
5.4.3 Structure and Implementation of the System ............................ 111
5.4.4 Current Status................................................................................. 112
5.4.5 Future Directions ........................................................................... 112
References............................................................................................................. 113
5.1 Introduction
If you were to log onto YouTube and type in “moonwalking bear,” a very
interesting video would pop up. It shows two teams of people dressed in
either white or black tossing around a basketball. You are asked to count
the number of passes made by the white team. Many people focus intently
on the video and get the correct answer, but when asked to review the tape
again, they are shocked to find that a guy in a bear suit moonwalked across
the crowd and they missed this entirely. How is it possible not to have seen
something so obvious? How could something in plain sight be overlooked?
Bombarded with information, the viewers had narrowed their focus on the
ball alone. The voice-over ends with “It is easy to miss something you are not
looking for.”
One can draw parallels between this example of selective attention and the
events surrounding the discovery of the West Nile virus (WNV) in the summer
of 1999. Crows were dropping out of the sky, and yet it took an astonishing 2½
months before the link between the human and avian deaths was achieved.
Many factors contributed to this delay, including the relative insensitivity of
state wildlife agencies to animal die-offs, the paucity of diagnostic capabilities
at the state wildlife lab level, the fact that the zoo birds that were critical to the
investigation fell between jurisdictional cracks of federal agencies and so on.
However, most of all, the diagnosis was missed because the key to the mystery
lay not in people but in captive and free-ranging birds.
The WNV outbreak underscored the absolute need to look for disease
threats across species. It highlighted our vulnerabilities when it comes to
surveillance of free-ranging wildlife and pointed out the unfortunate exclu-
sion of the private sector in biosurveillance efforts. Analyses of the outbreak
emphasized the need to work across agencies, across species, at the local,
state, and federal level, and the need to develop partnerships with nontradi-
tional health partners.
Zoos, it turns out, are ideal long-term urban biosurveillance monitoring
sites and are of great value to public health. Zoos have “situation awareness”
of the biological threats in their area. They house a captive collection of ani-
mals that can serve as sentinels for many zoonotic threats at a known point
source location. The valuable animals in their care are evaluated on a daily
basis by zoo professionals and/or veterinarians. Medical records are main-
tained. Zoos also do active and passive disease surveillance of local wildlife
