Hi -
I would like to respond Clean Water Service's description of Aspergillosis as "
a non-contagious fungal infection, " and with the statement " For people with
healthy immune systems, aspergillosis isn’t harmful and can’t be transmitted
from animals to people." There may be more then one strain of Aspergilla
fungus, but some at least can be quite dangerous to people, infecting the lungs
and causing serious pneumonia and lung damage. Years ago two colleagues of mine
contracted it while doing research in caves. One was a paleontologist who was
infected while sifting small vertebrate fossils from soil (containing much bat
guano) in a cave in Costa Rica. The other a mammalogy graduate student who was
placing bobcat heads turned in by trappers in Texas inside Bracken Cave, which
is a famous Mexican Free-tailed Bat cave. The floor of the cave swarms with
dermestid beetles, and he and others from Texas A&M would place animal remains
there for the beetles to clean the skeletons. Most years the cave was damp, and
the floor was sticky, but he had the misfortune of being there in a drought
year, and the air inside was very dusty. Ornithologists I have know took the
precaution of wearing pollen masks when working in guano-rich seabird colonies.
Ornithologist Dr. William Southern ended his multiyear research program on
Ring-billed Gull colonies in the Great Lakes because of concern over
Aspergillosis.
Aspergillosis is not as deadly as hantavirus, but the conditions for
contracting it are similar: breathing in air contaminated by dust from dried
animal feces, and direct contact with infected animals.
Wayne
From: rickmac1@xxxxxxxxxxx
To: "obol" <obol@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Sent: Sunday, November 1, 2020 11:21:27 AM
Subject: [obol] Fernhill Goose Fungus
Hadn’t seen this on OBOL yet (sorry if it’s a repeat. I had noticed an
unusually high number of dead cacklers last weekend. Also someone brought up on
PDX WhatsApp:
https://www.cleanwaterservices.org/newsroom/2020/fungal-disease-affects-geese-in-forest-grove/
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