WildAlert will be implemented in support of activities currently conducted by the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission (FWC) and the Florida Fish and Wildlife Research Institute (FWRI).

It is with a heavy heart that we share the news that our dear mentor and colleague Professor Rudovick Kazwala passed away on April 3, 2023.

In partnership with several collaborators including Smithonian Institution we published a computer simulation of what could happen if mountain gorillas got Ebola virus. There was an outbreak in humans in 2018 in DR Congo not far from Virunga National Park, so we know the virus is present in the region and gorillas are susceptible to the disease. Fortunately, this was just a theoretical exercise and the mountain gorillas remain Ebola-free.

Is Chile California’s home away from home? I visited Santiago, Chile again in Feb 2023, and once again felt strong synergies across the people and the places that have so much in common…it struck me that we share similar climates, similar crops, similar coasts, similar mountains, similar music, similar passions, to those we find in California… just in opposite hemispheres of our world.

OHI Research Faculty Dr. Pranav Pandit is leading a team as Principal Investigator - in collaboration with OHI colleagues Drs. Brian Bird, Christine Kreuder Johnson, and Marcela Uhart - to develop climate-sensitive models for individual arenaviruses in close collaboration with regional public health experts in Africa and South America.

A parasitic disease, canine echinococcosis, has increased in Chile’s Tierra del Fuego province after a governmental dog deworming program was canceled in 2004, according to a study from the University of California, Davis’ One Health Institute and School of Veterinary Medicine.

The EpiCenter for Disease Dynamics team is excited to launch an undergraduate fellowship program starting in the Winter of 2023 to help provide more inclusive and accessible opportunities at UC Davis.

The One Health Fellowships pilot program will offer students an opportunity to gain research experience and receive mentorship in support of their career development within the veterinary and health sciences. Two UC Davis undergraduate students from underrepresented groups will receive fellowships during the 2022-2023 academic year.

For millennia, animals, both wild and domestic, have provided humans with a seemingly endless number of benefits, from food to livelihood, education, transportation, and even emotional support. But this relationship also opens us up to zoonotic diseases, which can spill over from animals to humans. According to the CDC, 75% of new or emerging infectious diseases come from animals. The most notable example is COVID-19.

In the past decade, scientists have described hundreds of novel viruses with the potential to pass between wildlife and humans. But how can they know which are riskiest for spillover and therefore which to prioritize for further surveillance in people?

Scientists from the University of California, Davis created network-based models to prioritize novel and known viruses for their risk of zoonotic transmission, which is when infectious diseases pass between animals and humans.