MADISON, Wisc. (Ivanhoe Newswire) -- Keeping track of the world's wildlife is a tough job. Scientists believe there are diseases popping up that no one even knows about. Since a growing number of animal viruses can be spread to humans, researchers want to stay on top of the outbreaks as they happen. A new interactive map is keeping man and nature connected.
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Nature's beauty is breathtaking. But when disease threatens wild animals, who comes to the rescue?
"It's not like you can take your kid and say, 'Oh, he's not looking good. He may be sick. I'm going to take him to the physician,'" Joshua Dein, V.M.D., a wildlife veterinarian at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in Madison, Wisc., told Ivanhoe.
At a lab, veterinarians examine animals killed by disease to try to stop it from spreading. They depend on the public to alert them to problems, but a lot goes unnoticed in the wild.
"There's no coordinated method for reporting wildlife diseases in the country or in the world," Dr. Dein said.
That's starting to change thanks to the Global Wildlife Disease News Map. Updated daily, the site tracks where diseases such as West Nile virus, bird flu and monkey pox are making news.
"We do have situations in wildlife where you have hundreds of thousands of deaths occurring where we can step in," Dr. Dein said. "If in fact some of these diseases can be transmitted to people, then we want to know that really soon."
Wildlife disease information is collected from newspapers all over the world. Then, it is sorted by region, date and disease and displayed on a map giving people a bigger picture of the problem.
"Mapping disease outbreaks is important so that maybe the biologist or the person who's seeing events out in the field can then go and look and see, 'Oh, there's other things going on. I should probably report this. It may be important,'" Krysten Schuler, a wildlife ecologist at the United States Geological Survey in Madison, Wisc., told Ivanhoe.
Right now, wildlife ecologists are trying to figure out why a fungus is killing bats in the Northeast and why an exotic kind of lice is wiping out deer populations in the West.
"Try to gain as much info from one particular animal so we can apply it to the greater good," Schuler said.
Researchers say the map would have helped when the West Nile virus first came to the country. There were scattered reports of dead crows, but people didn't know there was a connection until months later. You can access the map by going to http://wildlifedisease.nbii.gov.
