Worldwide, stranded marine mammals and the network personnel who respond to marine mammal mortality have provided much of the information regarding marine morbillivirus infections. An assay to determine the amount of virus present in tissue samples would be useful to assist in routine surveying of animal health and for monitoring large-scale die-off events. False negatives from poor-quality sam...

SINCE May 2002, a new outbreak of phocine distemper virus (PDV) in harbour seals (Phoca vitulina) has been spreading through the North Sea (Harding and others 2002, Jensen and others 2002). By late September 2002, over 17,200 dead harbour seals had been reported dead in European waters (Reineking 2002), approaching the 18,000 deaths resulting from the PDV outbreak in 1988 (Heide-Jørgensen and o...

Patent ductus venosus (PDV) is an uncommon but important congenital portocaval shunt that can lead to numerous complications if untreated. This case describes the successful management of a 17-year-old male with symptomatic PDV. Doppler ultrasonography and contrast-enhanced computed tomography (CT) confirmed a large communication between the left portal vein and the inferior vena cava. Angiogra...

Ten of 11 cell lines, recently established from the snout (MS-SN), periorbital soft tissue (MS-EY), liver (MS-LV), kidney (MS-KD), lung (MS-LG), spleen (MS-SP), heart (MS-HT), thyroid (MS-TY), brain (MS-BR) and urinary bladder (MS-UB) of a juvenile Hawaiian monk seal Monachus schauinslandi, were evaluated in vitro for their susceptibility to 5 mammalian viruses: herpes simplex virus type 1 (HSV...

Unlike El Niño/Southern Oscillation (ENSO), spatiotemporal structures of Pacific decadal variability (PDV) remains to be robustly defined, due, in part, to the relative short lengths of available data sets; subsurface observations relevant to PDV are especially few and sparse. The resulting ambiguity in PDV characterization, among others, leads to difficulties in analyzing the mechanisms operat...