Professor Michael Ward, Chair of the Department of Veterinary Public Health and Food Safety at the University of Sydney, aims to gain new insight into the interface between wild and domestic animals to enable advanced assessment of the risk of microbial spillover.
You will complete an internship during the five-year Veterinary Medicine course. When I was a student, I quickly realized that working day in and day out in private practice, seeing mostly just dogs and cats, might be a bit monotonous.
I discovered that you can do much more. I was very interested in infectious diseases and epidemiology – I love that kind of stuff. These are global problems, and you need to go into the field to collect samples and make observations. Then it comes down to a desktop-based understanding of the data you’ve collected. As an epidemiologist, it’s all about those numbers. It suited me perfectly.
My work focuses on the interface between wild and domestic animals and the risk of disease spillover. People often point to a problem, like Covid, and say, “Oh, that happened because of the wildlife interface,” without trying to understand what that actually is.
That’s where my research comes into play. What creates that interface? What drives it? Is it always there? Does it change? Does it depend on different species, different landscapes? What are the components that come together to form this disease spillover risk? And if it is a risk, what could happen? Could this ultimately affect global human populations or global animal populations?
That’s the kind of thinking behind my research, with the aim of keeping Australia as disease-free as possible, and developing an understanding of the diseases that will inevitably come here so that we can hopefully be ready for them.
The Covid Wuhan market scenario, from what I’ve read, is a very boring, very simple type of interface. I mean, what do you expect when people bring caged wild animals and put them on top of cages of chickens or ducks? It wouldn’t take much to write that down. The conclusion? Don’t do it.
Case studies focus on animals
I supported my application for an ARC Laureate with four different case studies, based on more complex work I have already done.
Bird flu highlights exactly the problem. The species has previously appeared in Northern Europe and the US, but rarely in Australia until recently. The obvious question: why is this happening now? And it’s a great question.
Is there a new interface between wild and domesticated animals? Is contact between wild birds and domestic birds now much more likely? Is it due to free-range chicken and egg production? Is it because the wild birds are moving because their food sources have changed, or because their breeding cycles have changed, or is it climate change?
There are no obvious answers. People come with all these pieces of information, and it’s like a giant jigsaw puzzle to put them together.
Another area I have been working on is the disease called leptospirosis. Formerly called Canecutter’s disease because farm workers in Far North Queensland contracted the disease from rats in the sugar cane fields, and the disease was commonly seen in Queensland. People who milk cows ingest it because it is in the cows’ urine. If that gets into your conjunctiva, or if you have cuts, you can become infected.
There are outbreaks every time there is a flood, or in those parts of the world where drainage is poor and the water is contaminated. We hadn’t really seen it much in Sydney until 2017, when we saw a lot of cases in dogs in central Sydney – in suburbs like Surry Hills and Redfern.
This was really curious. Why did it suddenly start appearing after decades of apparent absence? Then came all the theories. One of these was that the earthworks of the light rail construction drove away rats – which seemed a bit far-fetched. There were quite a few floods that could be linked to it, through other species, and we worked on that. We looked at parks in Sydney and found that it can actually be found everywhere in the area – under play equipment, in the water bowls left out for dogs. It’s also in the rats, but is it also in the bats? Is it in the possums? That’s another case study. What’s going on? What caused this change?
My third case study concerns the spread of rabies in Indonesia. It is known that there was an outbreak in animals in Bali in 2008, and it is now coming very close to PNG and Northern Australia.
We are doing some modeling to try to predict what might happen if it were to arrive on our mainland. We’ve done a lot of work with domestic dogs in indigenous communities in Cape York and the Torres Strait, and how the disease might spread among the wild dog population, among the dingoes – trying to figure out the contact patterns between wild dogs and domestic dogs . .
Domestic dogs are allowed to roam there. It’s a very different kind of culture compared to urban areas. We also see dingoes coming very close to the townships. Again, you have that wild versus domestic interface.
My fourth case study took place in Washington’s Kimberley, where I looked at feral pigs and domestic cattle. Around Fitzroy Crossing you have a large population of feral pigs, mixed with livestock. We took samples from feral pigs to see if there had been any contact, based on the microbes they harbor.
Again, it’s the same theme. What are the main drivers behind these animal interactions? Hopefully in the future we can create an international collaboration center, either through the UN Food and Agriculture Organization or the World Organization for Animal Health, to put all this information into a risk assessment framework. That way, people can plug in their own information and understand the risks associated with a situation, wherever it may arise. We could add a qualitative scale to indicate whether it is high risk or low risk. We will make these tools available to the international community so that people around the world can make better-informed decisions.
As told to Graem Sims
Also in this series 2024 ARC Laureate Fellows:
Energy transition and communities: Professor Chris Gibson
Plate tectonics: Professor Alan Collins
Predicting groundwater discharge Professor Andrew Baker
Unraveling the mysteries of the immune system Professor Gabrielle Belz
Researchers hope to be able to monitor Antarctic vegetation remotely, Professor Sharon Robinson
How to build a quantum computer Professor Andrea Morello