A deadly fungal disease is spreading across Africa.
A highly contagious and deadly fungal disease is spreading, posing a major threat to the entire animal world. The fatal disease, known as chytridiomyositis, is caused by a microscopic fungus called Batrachochytrium Dendrobatides (BD). Infection with this fungus has a devastating effect on frogs and other amphibians.
The disease is so reactive to the skin of these animals that it must be removed, resulting in other symptoms such as lethargy, weight loss, and eventually cardiac arrest. The disease is highly contagious, transmitted through spores released from the fungus. “The risks of contagion are high,” Vance Vredenburg, a professor in the biology department at San Francisco State University, told Newsweek.
“In fact, this disease is the worst in history. It has infected over 1,000 amphibian species and caused the decline of approximately 500 amphibian species.” Since the 1980s, the pathogen has spread and caused mass euthanasia of amphibians around the world. A study published in the journal Conservation Science has now found that the fungal pathogen is spreading across the African continent.
But Vredenburg and his colleagues found that the disease is already ravaging Africa and that it has spread over the past two decades or appears to have been neglected in the region. The researchers found that they were likely to become more prevalent, and that amphibious declines and extinctions would already be happening there under the radar. “Since 2000, BD has been spreading in Africa and may threaten species across the continent,” Vredenburg said.
Africa is home to about 16 percent of known living amphibian species, but there are no described BD epizootics—diseases in animal populations similar to the human epidemic in Africa. The researchers said the lack of outbreak reports is likely due to lower BD sampling efforts in Africa compared to other continents, rather than a true absence of events.
“We should be concerned. This is the first fungal pathogen to cause this level of mortality in vertebrates. We should try to learn from this to better understand what factors caused them to have such an effect on the hosts,” Vredenburg said.
(WORLD)