Barron shares One World, One Health concept during One Health Day presentation
As part of the first ever “One Health Day,” CROW Hospital Director Dr. Heather Barron provided a presentation about the concept in the Visitor Education Center last week.
“People were interested in conservation on Sanibel long before it was sort of the in thing to be concerned about,” she said. “When I came here to just talk to the folks at CROW I immediately fell in love. It’s just such an amazing place in terms of all the wildlife you see and the health of the environment.”
Barron, who is starting her sixth year at CROW, said although the organization has been on Sanibel for 45 years, she believes she made some improvements since arriving turning the hospital and staff into much more than just wildlife rehabilitators.
“When I came here we did some strategic planning, the first in 45 years. We really talked about where we are going, how we can contribute more to wildlife health,” Barron said, which resulted in changing the mission statement,” Barron said.
The most important thing in wildlife medicine, she said is public health, individual animal health and welfare and population health and welfare.
“That is the basis of conservation medicine,” Barron said. “The interface between human health, environmental health and animal health.”
She said the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention stated that 70 percent of diseases are vector born, or zoonotic diseases that can go from animals to people.
“All of a sudden wildlife health began taking a much more prominent position in veterinarian medicine,” Barron said. “Most of the veterinarian schools teach something about it. I am writing the first textbook on wildlife health and rehabilitative medicine.”
Wildlife health, is sort of viewed as the canary in earth’s mine.
“Miners would take canaries down in the mines with them to see if there was any natural gasses released from where they were mining. The canaries would usually be affected first,” Barron said. “That was an early warning signal to the miners to get out of the mine, or do something about the leak. That is great, except if no one is watching the canary then how do you know when to get out of the mine?”
Her presentation included a few examples of One World, One Health concept.
When the West Nile Virus first came on the scene in the 1990s, Barron said no one knew what was going on with the virus. She said all they knew were people were getting encephalitis.
“They had no idea what it was until a wildlife veterinarian that was working at the Bronx Zoo started noticing that all the crows around the zoo were dying in record numbers. It was actually she who discovered that the West Nile Virus had finally made its way from other countries here in North America. It had started there and since spread to almost all of the lower 48 states. As of 2016, 47 states have reported West Nile Virus infections in either people, birds, or mosquitos,” Barron said.
She said wildlife can be the important part of the puzzle, but if no one is looking at wildlife and wildlife health, then the early warning signal can be missed.
CDC estimates about 800,000 people are infected with the virus every year, but typically the very young, or very old could die, or become very ill from the infection.
Another example was red tide, a fairly common problem that was first documented in the 1500s. Barron said they are seeing more red tides and worse red tides than they have ever seen historically.
She said CROW typically sees quite a few birds during a red tide bloom because they are sort of at the top of the food chain. The birds eat fish that have been affected by the red tide.
“Every time you go up the food chain, those toxins get more and more concentrated. When wildlife, particularly sea birds, or sea turtles, feed on the fish they can get really severe neurological symptoms,” Barron said. “The shore birds act almost like they are drunk.”
When CROW gets a lot of birds into the clinic because of red tide, they call local officials to let them know the area in which the animals came from.
“We’ve had as many as 100 birds come in over a couple of days just from this one problem alone,” Barron said.
She said there is almost no literature in how to diagnose and treat an animal with red tide, which ignited an area of research focus at CROW.
“We have really improved not only diagnostic options, but also treatment options. It used to be globally the recorded recovery rate for wildlife was somewhere in the neighborhood of 25 to 33 percent. We actually increased that to 55 percent,” Barron said.