Those of us who attended the Blue Mountain Forest Service meeting got the opportunity to listen to Dr Thomas Besser from the College of Veterinary Medicine at the University of WA. Here are a couple of excerpts from his bio on the university website at
http://vmp.vetmed.wsu.edu/people/faculty/besser
"My principal research focus is the epidemiology of zoonotic bacterial agents in their domestic animal reservoirs. In
addition, I have recently been working on the etiology of bighorn sheep pneumonia"
"Recently, I’ve begun working on a very different problem associated with cross-species transmission of pathogenic bacteria: epizootic pneumonia of bighorn sheep. This disease is strongly associated with Mycoplasma ovipneumoniae: North American wild sheep populations are normally free of this pathogen, but when infected are very susceptible to severe pneumonia that spreads through the population. For more information see:
www.bighornhealth.org."
Attached is a brief summary of his finding. The pathogen noted above is nick named MOVI. The study will be published in a few months. My understanding of his presentation is there is a goat specie specific MOVI strain of this pathogen and another MOVI strain associated with domestic sheep specie. Both MOVI strains are deadly to big horn sheep. It is an anaerobic pathogen (does not like oxygen) which has made it harder to discover. MOVI is associated with all recorded big horn sheep die offs.
The orginal big horn sheep die off about 20 years ago in Hell's Canyon was caused by the domestic sheep strain of MOVI. Please see the attachment here regarding another die off during the summer of 2014 involving these big horn sheep. This recent die off was caused by the goat strain of MOVI (this is known by the DNA of the pathogen).
This pathogen is goat and sheep specified and is not found in other animals.
It is not common in "small herds".
It is not harmful to our domestic animals.
It does not survive long without a host animal but will move within a herd.
It is not known how far it can travel with a cough or sneeze but it is not miles, no safe distance is established.
It is not treatable as yet.
We can test our goats at WADDL. $40 for the blood test looking for antibodies that confirm exposure or a $10 nasal swab that will assess active MOVI.
This is my interpretation of the information. I would encourage everyone who is interested to look at what data we have available to us. Dr Foreyt's studies are mentioned in the "discussion" section of the one published study I found on MOVI at
http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article...ne.0110039
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