Reflecting on Ethical and Legal Issues in Wildlife Disease

Inevitably, most discussion of bioethical issues concerning infectious disease has concentrated on disease in humans. However, disease in wildlife raises a number of important ethical questions that have not been widely considered. For several reasons, this is an important omission. Wildlife diseases are of direct concern to human well-being. Almost all emerging diseases of humans are zoonotic: that is, they occur in humans by cross-species transmission from an animal host 1,2. Examples of current interest include Ebola virus, which appears to have transferred to humans from the great apes in East Africa 3, HIV, which appears to have taken a similar route into the human population 4, SARS, which appears to 2 have a variety of wild mammalian hosts in southern China 5, and avian influenza, which occurs in wild waterfowl and is transferred to humans by domestic poultry 6. Wildlife diseases may also be of significance to domestic stock. For example, bovine tuberculosis is a major problem in the dairy industry and is thought to have wildlife as reservoirs 7,8 (badgers in the United Kingdom and brush tailed possums in New Zealand). As well as these routes of transfer from wild populations to domestic animals or human populations, transfer may als