Posted on 04/07/2007 6:30:18 PM PDT by ricks_place
The mystery emerged slowly, its clues maddeningly diverse.
Sally Lester, an animal pathologist at a British Columbia laboratory, slipped a slide under her microscope -- a tissue from a dog on Vancouver Island. Her lens focused on a tiny cell that looked like a boiled egg. It was late 1999. She had started seeing a lot of those.
On the eastern side of the island, several dead porpoises washed ashore early the next year. Scientist Craig Stephen, who runs a research center on the island, slit one open. He found its lungs seized by pneumonia and its other organs swollen by strange, flowerlike tumors.
At work at the family trucking firm in Victoria, on the southern tip of the island, Esther Young, a lively 45-year-old mother, was feeling lousy in the fall of 2001. She had headaches and night sweats and was tired, her family said.
The doctor told her she was pre-menopausal and it would pass.
All would become pieces of a medical mystery centered on a tropical disease apparently brought to North America by a warming climate. An alien fungus took root on Vancouver Island eight years ago and has since killed eight people and infected at least 163 others, as well as many animals.
Similar cases have been found elsewhere in British Columbia and in Washington state and Oregon. Scientists say the fungus may be thriving because of a string of unusually warm summers here. They say it is a sign of things to come.
"As climate change happens, new ecological niches will become available to organisms, and we will see this kind of thing happen again," said Karen Bartlett, a scientist at the University of British Columbia who played a central role in the search for the disease's cause.
(Excerpt) Read more at washingtonpost.com ...
I’m more concerned with Victoria dumping all of of its raw sewage directly into the sea.
Well any tropical bugs in IN are frozen and dead by now cause it is cold here!!!!!
26 degrees here tonight but it’s supposed to get cold.
It's getting to be a running joke looking news articles to see how they are going to work global warming into the subject.
Maybe they get prizes for the scariest ones each month.
Microfauna seem to be distributed at random across the face of the Earth, with very few of them (relatively speaking) dependent on particular climates.
Another strange disease.
Don't depend on cold to solve the problem. Many of the bacteria that I used in my microbiology labs arrived as freeze dried specimens in a dry test tube. Killing them required an autoclave that combines pressure, temperature and moisture for a sufficient period of time.
Oh please. This is just stupid.
A problem that's really starting to get out of hand now comes from tropical fish farms that raised a lot of exotic varieties in special ponds.
No problem until flooding washed the whole collection into the nearest stream/river, and you can see where that leads.
By the way, you CAN catch a piranha in Florida, but they aren't like you see them in the movies.
The only question to be asked of a fish is “how does it taste”.
I wish someone would put out a book of his wisecracks.
My favorite was one of his comebacks to Aunt Esther.
She says to him "Well I wasn't born yesterday!"
Fred: "I know....you can't get that ugly in 24 hours".
Because really nasty bugs wait dormant in the cold areas. It is demonstrated in the episode Ice of X-Files
If you do not listen to the Al Gore's warnings and do not sign the Kyoto treaty, the nature will punish you!
Is there ANYTHING going on in the world today that is NOT caused by “global warming”? This is getting ridiculous.
LOL!
Ping
You mean a tissue sample from this dog ...
Tell Hillary she can STAY in Canada!
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