Zoos Help Germs Jump Species Barrier

摘要

An international team of researchers has implicated a surprising culprit in the case of a dead polar bear: a zebra virus. In June 2010, Jerka, a 20-year-old polar bear in a zoo in Wuppertal, Germany, suffered seizures and died a few days later. In the animal's brain, scientists found only one candidate pathogen, a recombinant form of two herpes viruses found in zebras, EHV1 and EHV9, they reported last week in Current Biology.