NIH Gives $1.4 million to Tackle New Lethal Viruses Linked to Fruit Bats

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NIH Gives $1.4 million to Tackle New Lethal Viruses Linked to Fruit Bats

NEW YORK, PALISADES, Sep. 18 -/E-Wire/-- The Consortium for Conservation Medicine has been awarded $1.4 million from the Fogarty International Center, an arm of the National Institutes of Health, to fund research into two newly-identified zoonotic viruses which have killed more than 100 people in Malaysia and Australia since the mid 1990s.

Nipah virus, "discovered" in 1999, and Hendra virus, in 1994, are believed to be carried by fruit bats and transmitted to human populations through contact with domestic animals, such as pigs and horses, on farms in close proximity to fruit bat habitats. Forty percent of the known Nipah cases have been fatal. Both viruses are members of the Paramyxoviridae family. While this group of viruses has to date caused only a few focal outbreaks, their potential to infect a wide range of hosts and to produce a disease causing significant mortality in humans has made these emerging viral infections a public health concern, according to the World Health Organization.

The Consortium will coordinate research teams from the United States, Australia, England, and Malaysia investigating how changes to the environment may have increased contact between fruit bats, domestic animals, and humans. It is thought that deforestation, encroaching human activity and other changes have driven fruit bats to seek food in areas closer to human habitation.

"These viruses have only recently been discovered and are highly lethal," says Dr. Peter Daszak, Executive Director of the Consortium for Conservation Medicine, based in Palisades, NY. Conservation Medicine is an emerging transdisciplinary field that studies the links between animal, human, and ecosystem health. The Consortium's members include Wildlife Trust, Harvard Medical School's Center for Health and the Global Environment, Tufts University School of Veterinary Medicine, and the USGS National Wildlife Health Center (www.conservationmedicine.org). Core funding for the Consortium for Conservation Medicine is supplied by the V. Kann Rasmussen Foundation.

Dr. Daszak, a parasitologist and emerging disease ecologist, will be leaving for Malaysia next week. "We will examine how human changes to fruit bat habitat drive them closer to towns in Malaysia and Australia," he said, "Once we work out how the diseases emerge, we can propose measures to prevent future outbreaks. We believe the answer lies in preventing transmission to domestic animals while continuing to conserve these endangered bats."

Dr Alex Hyatt, a virologist at the Australian Animal Health Lab (CSIRO), will coordinate experiments to understand how the viruses are transmitted from fruit bats to secondary hosts. "We aim to improve our understanding of host-virus ecology whereby recommendations can be made to pig farmers that reduce the future risks of diseases emerging into intensive livestock industries around the world, " he said.

Dr Hume Field, of Australia's Queensland Department of Primary Industries will coordinate ecological studies in Australia and Malaysia. "We are dealing with the complex results of human alterations to wildlife habitat," Dr Field said, "It is our job to unravel this complexity and work out how these viruses emerged."

Funding comes through the "Ecology of Infectious Diseases" initiative, a new program of the NIH's Fogarty International Center, which addresses the need for fundamental research on how pathogens move through populations in a changing environment. "This is an exciting opportunity to work on a new approach to public health," Dr Daszak said, "In this research, we get to the real origin of emerging diseases â environmental changes that cause them to jump from wildlife to humans."

To learn more about Nipah virus: http://www.csiro.au/index.asp?type=faq&id;=Nipahvirus&stylesheet;=divisio nFaq

To learn more about Hendra virus: http://www.csiro.au/index.asp?type=faq&id;=HendraVirus&stylesheet;=divis ionFaq http://www.csiro.au/reports/Hendra2000/index.htm

To learn about conservation of fruit bats and other bat species: Bat Conservation International, Inc. protects and restores bats and their habitats worldwide through research, education and conservation - http://www.batcon.org

Consortium for Conservation Medicine

[REDACTED-EMAIL]

http://www.batcon.org

http://http://www.conservationmedicine.org

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