classicman • Oct 21, 2008 2:01 pm
Plague emerges in Grand Canyon, kills biologist
One day last October, Eric York lugged the carcass of an adult mountain lion from his truck and laid it carefully on a tarp on the floor of his garage.
The female mountain lion had a bloody nose, but her hide bore no other signs of trauma. York, a biologist at Grand Canyon National Park in Arizona, found the big cat lying motionless near the canyon's South Rim. He was determined to learn why she died.
Because the park lacks a forensics lab, he did the postmortem in his garage, in a village of about 2,000 park employees.
Epidemic experts can only speculate about what happened next. When York cut into the lion, he must have released a cloud of bacteria and breathed in. On Nov. 2, York was found dead, a 21st-century victim of plague, the disease that in the Middle Ages turned Europe into a vast mortuary. He was 37.
The case mirrors events that have promoted a global surge in epidemics, among them influenza, HIV, West Nile virus and SARS. A study released this year in the journal Nature reported that about 60% of epidemics begin when a microbe makes the leap from an animal into a human.
"What will be the next emerging disease? The one we least expect," says David Morens of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases.
Word of York's death flew among those who worked at the famed natural attraction, which draws 5 million visitors a year. For public health experts, it provoked concerns that plague might make a comeback. Experts from the National Park Service, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the Arizona Department of Health converged on the park.
Fortunately, their investigation found only 49 people who had come in contact with York. All were treated with antibiotics. None became ill, says David Wong, a National Park Service epidemiologist.