Soil ingestion, nutrition and the seasonality of anthrax in herbivores of Etosha National Park

By W. C. Turner, Peace Imologhome, Zepee Havarua, G. Kaaya, J. Mfune, I. Mpofu, Wayne M. Getz. 2013

112 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Anthrax, caused by the bacterium Bacillus anthracis, is a seasonally occurring infectious disease affecting primarily herbivorous wildlife and livestock. The seasonality of anthrax outbreaks varies among locations, making it difficult to develop a single consistent ecological description of this disease. Over 44 years of mortality surveillance, most anthrax cases in Etosha National Park, Namibia are observed in the wet season, although elephants have an anthrax mortality peak in the dry season. Focusing on three host species (plains zebra, Equus quagga; African elephant, Loxodonta africana; and springbok, Antidorcas marsupialis) occupying the endemic anthrax area of Etosha National Park, Namibia, we tested two commonly posited causes of anthrax seasonality in herbivores: increased pathogen exposure due to greater soil contact, and increased host susceptibility due to seasonal nutritional stress. These hypotheses were assessed using fecal sampling and measurement of the percentage of fecal silicates as an ...

Subfields: Genetics, Molecular Biology, Public Health, Environmental and Occupational Health

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/43d08120c75344e735f7eba207350489a922c350