Emerging diseases at the interface of people, domestic animals and wildlife. The role of wildlife in our understanding of highly pathogenic avian influenza.

The Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS) operates five parks in New York City, including the zoos at Central Park, Queens, and Prospect Park, the New York Aquarium and the Bronx Zoo. In addition, WCS manages some 400 conservation projects in 60 countries around the world. The commitment to the well-being of animals in zoos and to the conservation of critical landscapes around the globe provides a unique and robust set of competencies to provide critical health care programs that work to ensure the health of people, domestic animals, and wildlife. This was clearly demonstrated in 1999, when veterinary pathologists of the WCS were the first to connect the deaths of people, wild free-ranging birds, and zoo birds to a new disease to the Western Hemisphere. With samples from the WCS wildlife health surveillance program, the disease was confirmed to be West Nile virus. The Field Veterinary Program (FVP) of the Wildlife Health Sciences Unit of WCS is active on four continents and performs community-based wildlife population health monitoring and surveillance. This on-the-ground commitment to assessing the long-term health of wild populations provides critical information that can serve as an early warning system for the emergence of new and renewed pathogens at the rural wildlife interface as well as the regional urban marketplace. It has been WCS FVP teams that provided the observations and samples that confirmed that gorillas were dying of Ebola virus in central and west Africa. During recent years, the broad disease surveillance techniques of the FVP have provided a baseline of information on the health of mammals, YALE JOURNAL OF BIOLOGY AND MEDICINE 78 (2005), pp.339-349. Copyright © 2005. All rights reserved.