Pet Food Safety

The recall of lines of cat and dog food in the USA, Canada and Mexico is causing great concern amongst pet owners and veterinarians as a they try to establish what the scale of the problem is and what the risk is. The problem came to light following the reports of sickness and deaths of…
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Controlling the screwworm

Cochliomyia hominivorax, the New World screwworm is a serious pest that lays its flesh eating larvae into wounds of humans and any other warm blooded animals causing myiasis. The adult female fly lays batches of 200-400 eggs on the edge of fresh wounds and the larvae hatch and burrow into flesh 12-21 hr later. The…
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Bluetongue in Northern Europe

The recent bluetongue epidemic in northern Europe began in the summer (August) of 2006 and cases have been detected up until January 2007. The outbreak has been caused by serotype 8 of the virus and of the 2124, 695 cases were reported from Belgium, 7 from France, 952 from Germany, 460 from the Netherlands, and…
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Frog fungus

At the risk of developing a ‘save the animals’ theme, and despite saying last week that moving species around may not be a good idea, I’m now advocating the adoption of frogs by zoos, aquaria and botanic gardens.  This is, however, to promote an ex situ conservation programme to slow amphibian extinction in the crisis…
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Dolly: ten years after

The cloning of “Dolly” from adult sheep tissue was widely hailed as a breakthrough 10 years ago this week, when it was published in Nature. David Wells of AgResearch, New Zealand, says “it is still remarkable that NT [nuclear transfer] using differentiated donor cells can produce physiologically normal cloned animals.” However, as he points out…
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UK hopeful Bird flu has been contained

Following the outbreak of H5N1 avian influenza at a turkey farm in Holton, Suffolk, there is hope that the situation is under control. The cull of all 159,000 turkeys on the Bernard Matthews farm is now complete and an extensive clean-up operation is in progress. The disease appears to have been restricted to a single…
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Goodbye Barbaro

Champion U.S. racehorse Barbaro has been euthanized this week following a battle to recover from injuries sustained last May. The Thoroughbred fractured his leg in three places in a race shortly after a stunning victory at the Kentucky Derby, which he won by the biggest margin in 60 years. Barbaro’s progress following surgery has captured…
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Creating the Perfect Catfish

The search is on for the perfect catfish and scientists at the USDA have come up with the answer – fingerprinting fish! The channel catfish (Ictalurus punctatus) is the most commonly cultured fish in the US accounting for more than half of the nation’s total aquaculture output; catfish production and associated industries are now worth…
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Troubled times ahead for tuna

The World Wide Fund for Nature has warned that tuna stocks are disappearing at an alarming rate. The depletion is thought to be due to a combination of poor management of existing stocks and high levels of illegal, unreported fishing. According to WWF, Atlantic bluefin tuna used for high value sushi and sashimi are "massively…
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Dolly for Dinner?

In the future your Sunday roast may come from a cloned animal but would this be such a bad thing? The US Food and Drug Administration has recently released draft documentation of the safety of animal clones which reports that meat and milk from cloned animals and their offspring is as safe to eat as…
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