While there are major concerns that elephants in Kruger National Park are still at risk of human-borne tuberculosis (TB) after one was killed by the disease in 2016, experts say it was still a mystery how that elephant human contracted tuberculosis. After years of doing blood tests to screen most of the elephant population, according to experts at South African National Parks (SANParks), only six to nine percent of the animals tested showed signs of contamination. According to SANParks vet Dr. Peter Buss, it was nearly impossible to treat individual stray animals for a disease…
While there are major concerns that elephants in Kruger National Park are still at risk of human-borne tuberculosis (TB) after one was killed by the disease in 2016, experts say it was still a mystery how that elephant human contracted tuberculosis.
After years of doing blood tests to screen most of the elephant population, according to experts at South African National Parks (SANParks), only six to nine percent of the animals tested showed signs of contamination.
According to SANParks vet Dr. Peter Buss, while it was nearly impossible to treat individual stray animals for a disease like TB, the goal of the sanParks TB study was rather to gain a better understanding of the disease’s prevalence in the wild population.
“We have to imagine that this elephant has gone to communities and gained access to food, but that’s just a guess,” Buss added.
“The reason we can’t treat them is that when you think about how to treat a human with TB, it takes six to nine months to treat them with daily tablets, so there’s just no way to run that treatment regimen in a loose-leash. wild animal.”
While visiting the country’s premier national park, Buss and his team focused on a young bull elephant who was about 14 years old. of thiafentanyl, an opioid, and azaperone, a tranquilizer, in the hindquarters of the animal.
This after more than 30 minutes of trying to shoot an elderly bull elephant and the helicopter pilot who tried to lead him to a clear area. But he decided to run in the opposite direction.
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However, Buss and the pilot saw another that was much more manageable and with the doses in the arrow, the drugs had their full effect after about eight minutes.
He stumbled across the field far from the prying eyes of tourists and finally fell on his side as the helicopter hovered above him. Buss said one of the procedures was a bronchial wash, in which sterile fluid was pumped into the animal’s bronchi, sucked back out, and saved for later lab analysis.
“The point is, if the elephant has active tuberculosis and has lesions in its lungs, and they secrete organisms into their airways, by putting the fluid in and sucking it out again, you hope to restore those organisms,” Bus said.
Professor Michelle Miller, the South African research chair on animal tuberculosis at Stellenbosch University, said they hoped to gain more information to better understand how the animals were infected and what impact this would have on them in the long term.
“We didn’t think elephants were necessarily affected by TB like buffalo and lions, but since then we’ve developed a testing program to look for the bacteria in respiratory secretions,” she said.
Miller said an animal can have the disease for more than 20 years before the symptoms, which had been discovered in zoo elephants, appear. Other than the one found dead in the park, there were no other such cases. Meanwhile, SANParks great mammal ecologist Dr. Sam Ferreira that there were more than 31,000 elephants in the park.
The pattern of increasing numbers was the opposite of what happened in other larger parts of Africa.
“We always hear that there are too many elephants in Kruger, that there will be some ecological consequences, such as tree breaking,” he said. But there’s no evidence for that, he said.
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