HEALTH MONITORING OF WILDLIFE FOR THE PROTECTION OF HUMAN, LIVESTOCK AND ENVIRONMENT HEALTH

The risk of spreading pathogens among wildlife, humans and livestock is increasing in recent years. This increased risk is being driven by multiple factors related to changes in human society (e.g., mobility, recreation), animal husbandry (e.g., intensification, range farming), natural habitat (e.g., forest cover, connectivity), and climate change (e.g., mean temperature, rainfall). Until these underlying factors are addressed, it is important to carry out effective surveillance activities for early warning of disease emergence. This requires disease surveillance of not only humans and livestock, but also of the reservoir for many of these diseases: wildlife. “Wildlife reservoir” is a deceptively simple term for a complex entity. For these reasons, a target surveilance was performed in Brescia Province aimed to idenentified the possible presence of diseases selected in base of the zoonotic risk, the possible impact on domestic animals and on wild animals(bovine tuberculosis, Aujeszky disease, EBHS).The application of the recommended approach (Boadella et al. 2011; Ryser-Degiorgis 2013) let to identify zoonotic disease as M. caprae in red deer, evaluate the natural prevalence of disease with high value for domestic as Aujeszky disease in wild boar, define through modelling the epidemiological trends of wildlife specific disease as EBHS in hare and standardize a new way of sampling and analyzing blood for EBHS. From the present experiences, it’s more evident that effective wildlife disease surveillance depends on knowledge of the biological characteristics of the target populations, as well as changes in population sizes and in geographical distribution over time. Such knowledge is required in order to design appropriate sampling protocols for disease surveys, to develop disease contingency plans, to assess the risk of disease transmission to other species, and to guide wildlife management strategies in general. For these reason, three actions can help to improve knowledge on wildlife diseases and capacity to deal with their consequences on animal and human health as well as conservation: (1) extend surveillance schemes to the not yet included regions and taxa, (2) improve coordination between surveillance schemes and other wildlife monitoring and (3) promote multidisciplinary research on the relevant wildlife diseases linked with local health situation.