Big cats and small dogs: solving the mystery of canine distemper in wild tigers

If you think getting your cat to the veterinarian is tricky, a new study - led by Cornell Wildlife Health Center, the University of Glasgow and the Wildlife Conservation Society; and published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences - has revealed that vaccination of endangered Amur (Siberian) tigers is the only practical strategy to protect them from a dangerous disease in their natural habitat in the Russian Far East. Canine distemper virus (CDV) causes a serious disease in domestic dogs, and also infects other carnivores, including threatened species like the Amur tiger, which numbers fewer than 550 individuals in the Russian Far East and neighbouring China. It is often assumed that domestic dogs are the primary source of CDV, but in a new study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, researchers found that other local wildlife was the primary source of CDV transmission to tigers instead. Sarah Cleaveland, Professor of Comparative Epidemiology at the Institute of Biodiversity, Animal Health and Comparative Medicine at the University of Glasgow, said: "This work shows that CDV in the Amur tiger is a solvable problem - a rare piece of good news for the tiger conservation community." Dr Martin Gilbert, from the Cornell Wildlife Health Center, said: "Understanding how tigers are catching distemper is absolutely crucial to helping us design effective measures to minimize the conservation impact of the virus. "Vaccinating tigers is hard to do, but our research shows that immunizing just two tigers within a small population each year can reduce the risk that CDV will cause extinction by almost seventy-five percent.