The Cornell K. Lisa Yang Center for Wildlife Health, with programs around the globe, strives to sustain a healthier world by developing and implementing proactive, science-based solutions to challenges at the interface of wildlife health, domestic animal health, human health and livelihoods, and the environment that supports us all.
This session takes us to Antarctica. For a long time considered a “clean” environment, research has shown that viruses, bacteria, and other pathogens thrive in Antarctica. Some of them have always been there, but others have recently emerged due to human activity. The most recent and dramatic example is the global spread of highly pathogenic avian influenza, or bird flu, which emerged in domestic poultry in the Northern Hemisphere and spread all the way to Antarctica, killing hundreds of thousands of penguins, albatrosses, and seals on its way.
Dr. Amandine Gamble and her team will share their recent fieldwork experiences in the Antarctic and sub-Antarctic regions to help illustrate how wildlife health is connected to human activity, even thousands of miles away, and how a holistic, ecosystem health approach can increase the resilience of wildlife populations facing new disease risks.
