EEHV

Working in the Lab to Save Animals in the Wild

Posted on by Sara Klink
Asian elephants with babies in Planckendael zoo, Muizen near Mechelen, Flanders, Belgium. Image copyright: Ad Meskens [CC BY-SA 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0)] via Wikimedia Commons

Wildlife conservation is a major focus around the world. With habitat loss and climate change, Asian elephant populations are under severe pressure. Add in an infectious disease that is fatal to the young and you have a recipe for disaster. Even with efforts to breed the endangered Asian elephants in zoos to build the population, elephant endotheliotropic herpesvirus (EEHV) thwarts conservation efforts. EEHV causes hemorrhagic disease in Asian elephants younger than 10 years old, a disease with rapid onset and high mortality. In fact, some numbers indicate EEHV is the cause of death for at least 25% of Asian elephants born in zoos and the wild globally.

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Elephant Endotheliotropic Herpesvirus—A Tiny Virus Threatens the World’s Elephants

Posted on by Kelly Grooms

My favorite ice-breaker of all time is: “List one fact about you that no one would guess”. It is my favorite because I have an awesome answer (if I do say so myself). My go-to answer is: I spent a summer working with elephants.

It was the summer before I graduated from college, and it was really only one elephant, a five-year-old African elephant named Connie. Connie was intelligent, curious and mischievous—her favorite game with me was trying to untie my shoelaces (hint: double knotting is important). Working with her was one of the most amazing experiences of my life and left me with an abiding love for these creatures.

African elephant mother and child
Young African elephant touches his mother

Understandably, I was excited last year when one of my fellow bloggers wrote about Promega helping support the work of Virginia Riddle Pearson, who was working to identify and track strains of elephant endotheliotropic herpesvirus (EEHV) in African Elephant populations. EEHV is associated with the lethal elephant hemorrhagic disease (EHD) (1). This disease is a serious threat to the captive breeding programs of these endangered creatures. Between 1962 and 2007, it accounted for 58% of the deaths of North American captive-born Asian elephants between 4 months and 15 years of age (1). These deaths include the first Asian elephant calves born at the National, Oakland and Bronx Zoos. EHD also claimed the first live-born Asian elephant calves conceived by artificial insemination in both North America and Europe.

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