What Are the Benefits and Role of Viruses in Wildlife?
More Programs and Publications Featuring Dr. Rodney Rohde
In this program:
Do viruses in wildlife actually provide benefits? Medical laboratory scientist Dr. Rodney Rohde discusses viral vectors that spread viruses, benefits of viral exposure, and proactive advice for patients.
Transcript
Interviewer:
So, Dr. Rohde, how can we better understand the world of wildlife and zoonotic viruses and the transmission of infectious diseases to humans?
Dr. Rodney Rohde:
Yeah, this is really an important question because what happens is it comes down to a lot of things, and one of the primary things we have to understand is that we have to better understand how that wildlife and the virus, and I'm going to throw in something else here called the vector. And so it could be a mosquito vector, it could be a tick vector, it could be something else. But that cycle, that life cycle of how a virus rotates through different rodents, through which wildlife populations, it rotates through what time of the year, seasonality is important, are there other pathological or human conditions that might allow that virus to jump quicker into a human or a rodent or another animal. And so we must spend more money. So funding is part of that. We need more wildlife biologists, we need more microbiologists, we need more public health experts doing research in ecology and population dynamics so that we really start to understand that interface, because you can't take an approach of just a single focus. We tend to call this across the world now one health approaches. And so that means we have to understand animal health, we have to understand human health...
Interviewer:
…everything is connected.
Dr. Rodney Rohde:
We have to understand environmental health. And then we have to understand that all of those add up to one health kind of approaches.
Interviewer:
So from a preventative standpoint, how can we find a balance in wildlife exposure at whereas in one sense, it's deliberate, it's inevitable, and it actually can benefit us by increasing microbiome diversity? So being exposed to nature and all these things can be good for us, but in the same sense can lead to incidental exposure to dangerous pathogens. Is there a balance?
Dr. Rodney Rohde:
Yeah, I think there is a balance. That's an interesting question. I would think that...one way to think about that is in our natural living conditions, in our everyday exposures to other individuals, whether it's humans, animals, plants, crops, dirt, and air, all of those things are going to present us with immune challenges. And so that is part of presenting our body with an opportunity perhaps to build defenses and immunity over time. But I would still stress that one needs to be careful and understand kind of what environments they're going into. For example, if you're traveling into an area that has very high filovirus activity like from Ebola or Marburg, I wouldn't actually recommend you challenging your immune system, because there are no good therapies. We are seeing some vaccine development in those areas. So I think it's about education as well. I actually talk about this sometimes with family and friends who are traveling, right?
So I think one of the things that we don't do real well in health is talk about how critical it is to prepare for travel. And so when you travel right now, for example, right now, certain places in Europe and around the world, they are exploding in dengue virus infections, which is a mosquito-borne virus. And if you leave, for example, Texas, where I live, and you go somewhere like Brazil or Argentina right now, you really should be prepared and thinking about that because your body's kind of naïve, it's never probably been exposed to dengue virus. And dengue virus can be deadly, and it certainly can be really difficult to handle. It's called breakbone disease. It can be very painful and problematic. So I really am a big advocate of public health education, and that really intersects with healthcare. So physicians and other primary care physicians that know their patients, know their traveling. It's really a two-way street, right? I mean, they don't know we're traveling, so we really need to think about it. So I'm often telling people, "You have to speak up, or if you're planning a big trip, do a little research and visit with your physician. Tell them where you're going. Should you get vaccines? Should you be thinking about malaria or some other mosquito-borne disease? Should you be told do not pet?"
To your point about wildlife, some places in this world still have rabies. I'm a rabies expert. It's different if I pet a domestic dog in Texas versus petting a dog in Latin America where thousands of people still die, or Vietnam, thousands of people still die and or have rabies exposures in those types of countries. So again, I think it's just about being educated and having that conversation with your physician and other healthcare team.
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