'Project Tripwire' could detect bioterrorism, assist in finding and treating disease in wildlife

Date published: 8/15/2006

NOT LONG ago, there were short reports in this newspaper and others about The Wildlife Center of Virginia being chosen to develop a surveillance network designed to detect possible bioterrorism across the U.S.

It didn't surprise me that the project would go to the Wildlife Center, perhaps the most well-known and advanced center of its kind in the country.

I wanted to know more about this system they would be researching and developing.

Would it be for detecting anthrax in deer? Cholera in pigs? The plague in songbirds?

To find out more, I dropped in on Wildlife Center Director Ed Clark and Patti Bright, the center's director of veterinary medicine.

They were glad to share basic details of the $166,000, six-month contract with the Institute for Defense and Homeland Security, a consortium of university, industry and federal research and development partners. Funding for it and other projects came through a research division of the Air Force.

Clark and Bright explained that the idea behind the project, called Project Tripwire, is simple.

If there are bioterrorism or biosecurity threats in our country, one of the first places they could be detected and analyzed is in wildlife.

"If someone tries to contaminate a river or a reservoir, most likely the first victims would be geese or ducks found on the banks of those waters," said Clark. "Finding those birds and examining them, we could rapidly get word to the people who need to know what we're dealing with, defense and homeland security decision-makers."

Local authorities and the network of wildlife rehabilitators--who would likely be the ones to find more birds or other animals affected by contamination--also would be notified.

Right now, said the pair, wildlife centers and other facilities that deal with killed or injured animals operate largely on their own. Unless a threat to humans is seen, these facilities don't report findings to groups like the Centers for Disease Control, and most often don't share data with other wildlife facilities.

That's why national health officials were slow to pick up on the problems presented by the spread of West Nile disease in various bird species, Clark said.

Officials from wildlife centers and hospitals, gathered for a conference several years back, only stumbled onto the discovery that a large percentage of them were finding dead and diseased birds.

"At one conference session a person mentioned finding animals affected by West Nile," said Clark. "Before the session was done, they asked for a show of hands and found that almost 80 percent of the people in certain regions had found something similar."

To change that, Clark, Bright and others at the well-known teaching and treatment facility are developing a system that would compile data from all the institutions and individuals who care for and treat wildlife.

Date published: 8/15/2006