[Animals] Four Rivers Wildlife: If Animals Could Speak

[rlex]

 

My wife and I were fortunate to receive our vaccinations this past week, and that immediately triggered in me a hope that everyone else in my life, as well as the rest of the planet, would also get one.  I quickly realized, however, that not everyone was as gung-ho about vaccination as we are, and there are a number of people that have decided, for now, not to get it at all.  If the animals and plants around us could speak, they would have lots to tell us, but I imagine that many of them would be trying to convince us to take the shot.  

Many species besides humans are in dire straits because of disease.  Scientists would love to have vaccines, or even treatments, to make these problems go away, and perhaps if we put more effort toward them, we would.  Currently, scientists and the governments that support them have focused their efforts on solving the pandemic, and multiple vaccines are now waiting for many of us.  By taking the vaccine, we create one less individual that a coronavirus can spread to, hurt, and potentially mutate within, reducing both the spread of the disease and its ability to evolve into something even more deadly.  Having such vaccines is a game changer, and I am sure that if the diseased animals and plants of the world could, they would line up for their own shot.
Deer and elk throughout the continent are being affected by Chronic Wasting Disease, and not only do we not have a treatment for it, we don’t even have a live test.  That is, unlike COVID-19, we can’t swab the nose of a live deer to know that it has CWD.  We have to kill the deer first.  Deer, if they could talk, would love the testing that humans take for granted, not to mention a vaccine that would make CWD go away.  So would hunters.

Amphibians throughout the globe have been decimated by a deadly fungus, called Bd, and the disease caused by Bd has led to the declines of numerous species, and the extinctions of others.  Although we can swab for the presence of Bd just like COVID, and we can treat amphibians in the lab to rid them of the fungus, much like our friends and family that have spent time in the hospital, we don’t have a way to stop Bd from affecting amphibians in the wild.  Frogs everywhere would love the idea of a vaccine against Bd, if only they could talk.
Dr. Suess’s Lorax proclaimed “We speak for the trees”.  I am sure he would have plenty to say today.  If American Chestnuts had a voice, they would ask where the line was for the vaccine against chestnut blight.  Chestnut blight is a disease that hitchhiked with introduced Asian chestnut trees over a century ago, and within two decades it had decimated native chestnuts throughout the eastern U.S.  Once one of the dominant tree species of our forests, only a few individuals remain, and no effective treatment has been discovered.  When a tree gets the blight, its chances are slim.  American Chestnuts would love to have had a vaccine before their numbers were so diminished, but the few remaining ones would take one without hesitation.

The science of vaccines stands on strong shoulders, and has been around for centuries.  Buddhist monks drank snake venom to immunize themselves from snake bites and the Chinese smeared torn skin with cowpox to confer immunity to smallpox during the 1600s.  In 1796—when our country was barely 20 years old—Edward Jenner relearned this Chinese discovery by observing that English milkmaids who previously had caught cowpox from their cows were not susceptible to smallpox.  By 1798, the first smallpox vaccine was available.  Across the next two centuries, wide scale implementation of smallpox vaccines allowed its global eradication in 1979.
The history of vaccines goes on and on: Louis Pasteur helped develop vaccines for cholera and anthrax in 1897 and 1904.  Bacterial vaccine development started in the late 19th century.  Tetanus shots appeared in 1923, diptheria in 1926, and pertussis in 1948.  If some of those diseases sound arcane and lost to history, they are.  That is what an effective vaccine does.

But it doesn’t stop there.  Polio vaccines have now eradicated that disease from many parts of the world.  Measles, mumps, and rubella vaccines have all been developed, and measles may be susceptible to elimination from the planet—all because of vaccines.  Most recently, advances in molecular biology have allowed the development of hepatitis B vaccines, new seasonal influenza (flu) vaccines, and, of course, those that are currently being distributed for COVID-19.  Vaccine development may eventually not only allow us to combat emerging infectious diseases, but also allergies, autoimmune diseases, and addictions.
Like many other scientific discoveries, our ability to affect the spread and impact of COVID-19 is built upon hundreds of years of previous science.  In some ways, the shot I just received is not that much different than those first smallpox vaccines, which changed the way the world treated disease.  However, similar to previous diseases that affected humans, the vaccine has to be widely deployed to stop the disease in its tracks.  Every person with cold feet, or every person that listens to a viral social media feed over scientists, is one more foothold for the disease to spread, and is one more opportunity for someone to get sick, and die.  As a society, we need everyone on board, and everyone to do their part, to make sure that COVID-19 doesn’t take another half a million lives in its second year of spread.