Human Tuberculosis in wildlife

I picked up this interesting item on the Wildlife Disease Digest listserve (wdin@usgs.gov) of today's date. They run a blog (here) that covers many topics, and this one caught my eye. It concerns a recent article in the Times of South Africa has highlighted a problem that is likely to get worse as human populations expand and wild animals become more and more crowded and pressurized by people. The headline reads Human TB Strain Jumps To Animals and the key sentence reads “The human strain of the disease has been found in springbok, mongooses, baboons, chimpanzees and, most recently, a Maltese poodle." (Note the incorrect use of the plural mongooses, with the extra "s") The full story can be found here.

Of course this article builds upon scientific reports from authors working in other regions, most notably Botswana and South Africa, where the human form of the disease, caused by Mycobacterium tuberculosis has been found in both banded mongoose and meerkats (aka suricates).

An important journal article published in the journal Emerging Infectious Diseases by Kathleen Alexander and her co-investigators that describes the situation can be found here. Simply put, the animals had probably been exposed to the human form of tuberculosis at rubbish tips, or by investigating sputum that passers by had spat on to the ground. As Tb is the world’s most important infectious disease, and appears to manifest itself even more rapidly than before when a person is infected with HIV/AIDS, the risk to the animals is hugely increased.

We have seen examples of this self-same situation in Uganda, where, I had taken students from the Western College of Veterinary Medicine in 2003. The trip was the first in what has become an annual rotation for final year students enrolled in the college, and it is called the “African Wildlife Experience.” (you can find out more about at the 2007 and 2008 students blogs here.) Our goal is to link closely with students and faculty of the Makerere University Veterinary school, specifically the Department of Wildlife and Animal Resource Management (aka WARM).

In 2003 we saw a severely emaciated warthog (seen here) at Mweya, in Queen Elizabeth National park, and Ugandan faculty member Dr. Ludwig Siefert obtained permission to immobilize it and carry out a necropsy. We all saw lesions in liver and lung that looked very much like Tb, just like these small white spots in the liver, but to date we have had no confirmation of culture results.

The connections to human and other animal activity are interesting and convoluted. The warthogs in and around the lodge and backpacker’s hostel are totally habituated and can be found rooting in the garbage at any time – witness these two photos. Not only are they habituated to humans, but they have an amazing symbiotic relationship with banded mongoose, the same species that has been diagnosed with Tb in Botswana.

As this photo shows, the mongoose will clamber all over a warthog, appearing to search for food goodies that may range from ticks to skin scraps and who-knows-what else. Warthogs will lie down and solicit attention as soon as they see a mongoose.

Most alarming has been the recent finding in the park of an elephant that had lesions resembling Tb. We are going to Uganda again in February, and will hope to learn more. I wonder if the elephant is the bottle-raised Maria, seen here near the hostel and very near a group of warthogs, that has been a more-or-less permanent resident of the area. In 2003 she tried her damndest to get into our rooms, convinced that the bananas unwisely stored there were for her. The only problem was that she could not get her 40 inch wide frame through the 30 inch wide doors. She did manage to drink the wash water that one of our students had so carefully collected.

Tuberculosis in Lions hits the Saskatoon stage

Wildlife issues - a true lion story in this case - crop up in the most unlikely of places. I have just spent an enthralled and enthralling three days at a conference in Saskatoon, or more accurately, two intertwined conferences. The academic one titled "The Oral, the Written, and Other Verbal Media: Interfaces and Audiences" was closely linked with performance spoken word of several kinds in the cleverly titled “The eVOCative Festival and Conference”. There was Slam Poetry, Sound Poetry, Punning Poetry and beautiful poetry in several forms ranging from Hip Hop to Erotic and beyond as well as formal storytelling, although all of it could really be called storytelling.

The main organizer, Susan Gingell of the University of Saskatchewan, and her amazing team built the two events to complement each other and bring artists and academics from as far away as New Zealand and Australia, Trinidad, and Scotland as well as all over North America together. A core element was the involvement of aboriginal artists and their stories. She succeeded with gold stars.

Imagine my surprise when one of the presenters – Catherine Kidd (known by weird coincidence in this case as Cat) proceeded to tell the story, in a mesmerizing word and movement act full of clever rhymes and vivid images, of her witnessing the dying of a lioness in South Africa’s Kruger National Park. She and her host saw the animal, its skin stretched tight over unnaturally prominent ribs and hip bones, as it lay almost moribund beside the road. Her words soon confirmed my suspicions that the animal had been dying of tuberculosis and was a victim of its diet, as it surely must have eaten some part of an infected cape buffalo.

Cat’s prose poem and sinuous body movements (she later confirmed to me that she is a devoted yoga practitioner) moved on from the lion to a meeting with two refugees from Mozambique who were running the sixty kilometre gauntlet of a national park where lions and other large predators roam free in order to find jobs in South Africa. It is an all-too-chilling version of a certain TV show where good-looking guys and scantily clad women have to survive a weird collection of “hazards” dreamed up by script-writers. Nobody knows how many desperate men and women make it to safety, or fail horribly, in the real-life version.

This was drama enough, but I know that I was the only wildlife vet (albeit retired) in the audience and also the only one who knew and had written about these very same things. I was able to show Cat the photo that the Kruger’s chief vet, Dr. Markus Hofmyer had sent me of a lion that had died of TB lying on the postmortem room floor at Skukuza, site of the park headquarters. Of course TB has been known in the Kruger for the best part of thirty years, ever since it entered the park with infected cattle from the south. Buffalo are the main victims, but other species, including several antelopes and other predators such as leopards, cheetahs and hyaenas have also suffered. Markus has told me that about 25 lions a year die from the infection. And those are the ones they find!

Cat took some video footage of the lion’s last minutes, but has not yet edited it for release or published the written version, but she assures me that she soon will. When she does, I will get the news and permission and be one of the first to alert you and show you the text. Meanwhile you can find more about her published work and see some videos, almost all of it about animal life and her quirky view of it, on her web site.