 Good morning, everyone. Welcome to this first official meeting of the Board on Animal Health Sciences, Conservation and Research. I am Bob Disko. I am one of the co-chairs of this meeting, and with me is my fellow co-chair, Dr. Barbara Natterson Horowitz. And the two of us will lead you through a little introduction here on the, well, the existence of this board and its role and where we think we are headed. So, and a little bit on the agenda for the next two days. Could you go to the next slide, please? Thank you. So first off, for those who are unfamiliar and even those of us who have been involved for several years, it's always good to look at the organization to see how this works. And so the National Academy of Sciences Engineering and Medicine, or the National Academies, is the top row of our org chart. Below that, you see an executive office with some other central offices and a report review committee that comes at that level. And then below that is the divisions. And the one that's highlighted in the middle, as it should be, is the division on Earth and Life Sciences, Earth and Life Studies, or DELS, which is what we are all a part of. Next slide, please. Within DELS, there are several boards, and they are all listed here. What's highlighted is the Board on Animal Health Science Conservation and Research. Currently, our co-directors are Robin Shane and Kavita Berger, and you'll also notice two of the other boards have their names. They are also directors at those boards as well. All of these boards get together by Zoom periodically to talk about things that can be possible cross-board activities and other activities that are going on within the boards. And so this is a great opportunity that exists for all of us to get together, network, and talk about issues that are common to more than one board. Go ahead to the next slide, please. So this is a bit on the academies. And as the academies, the role is to provide guidance on program direction and priorities, help resolve scientific or science policy controversies, make technical analyses and independent peer review, inform science policy debates, build and maintain scientific networks, increase the visibility of emerging scientific fields and science policy issues, and summarize state of the science to audiences of various technical knowledge. So this could be scientists within the field, in other fields, or even the general public. So these are some of the roles that we aim to fulfill as part of the National Academies. Next slide, please. So the National Academies approach, there's five pieces to it. So there's stakeholder involvement, and what you're doing is trying to get leaders in different aspects of the community together to be able to talk about issues that affect all of them. And so that the example here is academia industry and government sectors, but even other non-government associations play a role in that. Independence, we want to ensure that our advisory activities are independent and objective. People are looking to the National Academies as a neutral voice, and so we need to respect that. We want to use innovative tools and methods to achieve the goals and objectives that are set out for the different boards and board projects. Collaboration. So here again, we're leveraging the expertise across disciplines and across boards, so that we can have answers to some of these questions that bring in the the wide breath of knowledge that exists in our country. And the last square is expertise and information, and that's to enable an exchange between the public private academic and nonprofit sectors of information and other data that is vital to the projects that are being undertaken by the boards. Okay, so we're going to sit here for a while. So, I wanted to take a moment to recognize, we had hoped that Dr. Lou Kentner, who authored the historical summary paper or lead author of that paper, that's in volume 62 issue three of the Isle Art Journal. We had hoped that he would be able to be one of our keynote speakers today. Fortunately for him, he is celebrating his 50th wedding anniversary, and he is on a nice trip with his wife. And so we said, have a nice trip, and we will cover this in another way, and we'll cover it briefly now by just saying that this is the 70th year of Isle Art. Isle Art was established in 1953. It was one of the first organizations in laboratory animal sciences that was created. It precedes ALAS and ALAC, and all those others by almost a decade. So it really was the first networking piece that existed for laboratory animal veterinarians and scientists in this country. It has done amazing things in those 70 years. It is most noted, of course, for publication of the Guide for Care and Use of Animals, which originally started as an NIH publication, then came over and became an ILR publication. And we are in the midst of discussing what to do with that guide in the next iteration as part of a standing committee that was created a few years ago to look into that project. And so I'll stop there. Please read that article if you have not. Lou Kintner, K-I-N-T-N-E-R. K-I-N-T-E-R. Okay. Thank you, Corey. K-I-N-T-E-R. And he is the lead author on that paper, and it is in volume 62, number three, which is actually, as of this point in time, the last issue of that journal. It is on hiatus right now, and determining what to do with that is one of the tasks that lies before us as a board in what we might want to do as far as communication methods in the future. So this transition occurred from ILR to BASCR. And the purposes, we came up with three of them for this transition. There are actually many more, but the three primary ones. It's to better represent and reflect the expansion of disciplines on research involving animals. Okay, so we are expanding beyond laboratory animals. And now we're talking about issues such as wildlife health, conservation biology, one health, planetary health. We are going bigger. And the speakers that you'll hear today will reflect that. To facilitate and promote transdisciplinary interactions that accelerate scientific insights. And to strengthen research that benefits humans, animals, environmental, and planetary health. So those are three of the main things, main objectives that we have in moving forward from an associate or a council, an institute, sorry, institute that focused on laboratory animals work to become a board, which focuses on the broader animal issues that face us today. And the other change, as many of you probably picked up is that we are now a board which puts us on equivalent footing with the rest of the boards within DELs. It's not that we were treated differently within DELs, but a lot of people didn't quite understand what we were and why we were an institute rather than a board. And that's just simply historical, but this puts us all on a more equivalent plane. Barbara, do you have anything you want to add at this point in time? No, I think that sums it up. This has been a process that's started about three, maybe a little bit more than three years ago. And so today marks sort of, I guess the official launch, let's say. Next slide, please. So this is the statement of task that the board came up with. This was generated. I want to thank Kavita and Robin for sort of putting the first framework of this together. And then we as a board met by Zoom and tweaked it. As you can imagine, there was lots of wordsmithing that happened during that time. But we're fairly comfortable with what this says. And I just want to emphasize the two lines that are highlighted in colors. So the first is the focus, and it is focusing on supporting responsible and scientifically rigorous approaches to research that involves animals and advances in alternative approaches to animal research. And in green, it's talking about some of the activities and studies. And what we're looking at is to examine innovative methods and approaches to studies involving animals, develop guidance to ensure the appropriate care and use of animals in research. And again, now that we're talking about all animals and foster greater public understanding of the research that science conservation of the, I'm sorry. The issues that science conservation and research associated with the lab with animals needs to address. Okay, we are looking to be collaborative we're looking to work with other boards and other boards tackled animal based issues in the past. So that was not just the purview of Ilar, but now we are in a position I think to better work with some of those other boards on some of the projects that they have in their wheelhouse that we might be able to add expertise to. Next slide please. Okay, here is the current board membership on the left. You can see right now we are at 10 members. We are talking about adding members and we also have terms that will be expiring that we have to work on so anybody who is in the audience, who knows of someone that would be an awesome board member. And I stress the word awesome. We are going to be able to accommodate them, even if it's yourself. Go ahead and do that, because we are going to be looking at how we are going to expand this board. And on the right in the blue column is the awesome staff that we have here at the National Academies that's conducting all the work behind the scenes and getting everything ready for today's program. I think I speak for all of the board when I thank them profusely for the hard work they've done in packaging all this together and sparing us the trouble of having to do it ourselves. Next slide please. Okay. So today, we'll have two keynote speakers to start off. First is Elaine Ostrander from the National Human Genome Research Institute. And she's going to talk about her research on dogs and what dogs wish we knew about their diseases morphology and behavior. Our second keynote speaker is Dr. Raina Plowwright from Cornell University. And she's going to talk about the dynamics of pathogens in reservoir host and understanding spillover risk. So talking more about zoonotic issues and concerns where we have animal and human health in peril. Next slide please. And we are going to have, let me just take a step and say that our invited speakers today, our keynotes and our panelists, we chose very prominent scientists and folks who can also really reflect and show what this expanded landscape of disciplines that are doing research involving animals, what the potential is just the beginning. So we really wanted to just kind of feature what's already happening. So, we'll be having panel discussion speakers after lunch, I believe, and they will include. So we have Dr. Claire, Claire Hankerson, University of Pennsylvania achievements and emerging needs to the for the care and use of laboratory animals. We'll have who's from the, I'm sorry, I can't read that far. Yeah, Cynthia Smith. Yeah, Cynthia Smith, I just can't read it. Okay, since why don't you go ahead and do it. Oh, okay, it was the, the next panel discussion speakers Dr. Cynthia Smith. She's from the Marine Mammal Foundation and she's going to be talking about studies in conservation health effects from the environment of marine systems. Tracy, Tracy Goldstein from the One Health Institute at Colorado State University wildlife surveillance for one health. Tracy Vasovsky, Cornell Wildlife Health Center at Cornell University, speaking on beyond fences policy options for wildlife, livelihoods and trans boundary animal disease management in southern Africa. And Rowena Watson from the US Department of State speaking on international standards for animals and research and wildlife animal trade. Also note, there's a message from Rowena saying that we need to correct her title so the title of her talk so I will share it as soon as I get it. Thank you. Next slide please. That's the end of the slide deck. Okay, so that's the agenda for today. And then the board meets tomorrow in a closed session to review some activities, some of the cross board opportunities will be discussed. I will have representatives from several of the other boards here to tell us what they're working on and, and we can then chat with them directly on where some opportunities lie. And just by saying that the other day in the car. Elton John's circle of life came on the radio. It's been now playing in my head for about three days. But it was, it was kind of funny because I had joked in talking with some people that this was a big moment where we're all coming together and sort of a circle of life celebration. And of course, the gods chose to put it in on my serious XM channel so I could have it in my head. If I break out singing it later, you'll understand. Okay, and with that, I think we move over to our first keynote. Am I correct. Well, I just wanted to say to the people out there in the world of internet who are listening into this presentation that you have an opportunity to ask questions using the tools Slido that should have been part of the registration. It's a very simple put in your name and email and type in your question. And then you'll see all the questions from other people and be able to basically click on a little up arrow if you want to up vote questions asked by others so that they automatically sort themselves in the order of popularity and I encourage you to do that. So if you, if you're not on Slido but would like to be you just have to go to Slido SLID o.com. And the net the number associated with this meeting is pound sign 2481508 so that's pound sign 2481508, and that'll open up the question platform for you. So if you'd like to ask questions, we'll be collecting them as people speak and at the end of their presentations. Thank you. And now. Now, okay, great. So, I am pleased to present to you our first keynote speaker. It is Dr. Elaine Ostrander. He is chief and distinguished senior investigator of cancer genetics and comparative genomics branch at the National Human Genome Research Institute of NIH. She received her PhD from Oregon Health and Sciences University did postdoc training at Harvard and Berkeley went to the Lawrence Berkeley National Labs, and was working on the canine genome project. She was enabling the foundational resources needed to navigate the canine genome that Ostrander joined the Fred Hutch cancer research center and the University of Washington and 93. And she moved to NIH in 2004 to assume the position of chief and senior investigator at the NHGRI. So I welcome Dr. Elaine Ostrander as our first keynote speaker. Thank you. Thank you so much. Let me try the screen share again and see if I can get that we did it once. Try it. Yeah, my talk doesn't seem to be coming up. Not sure what to do. Try it again. Right. There's the talk. Let's try the share. There it is. We see it, but you just need to put it in presentation mode. All right, there we go. Thank you everybody for your patience. And thank you so much for giving me this opportunity to share with you the things that we've been doing in the domestic dog. We have a great relationship with the general public and ours is really citizen science. It's not things that are being done in the laboratory. So I want to give you an overview of how that kind of relationship with the general public that we have can inform studies of morphology disease susceptibility and behavior from a genetics point of view. So the first question we have to ask ourselves is why are dogs amenable to genetic studies? Why are we even doing this? Well, the first is large numbers. There's nearly 90 million dogs that are owned in the United States. Dogs live and they're exposed to the same environment as humans. So they really serve to reflect what's going on in the world around us. Healthcare dogs get pretty much the same diseases as humans. They receive extensive preventative and diagnostic healthcare. You know, in 2022 Americans spent $136 billion on their pets and about half of that went to healthcare medicines that visits insurance vaccines. And so we have really great health records that we could make use of sampling. We can sample multiple generations of a dog pedigree due to the fact that they have relatively long life spans. Some breeds on average, the dogs live to be about 20. So we can even get four generations of a pedigree, which is just great for doing genetic studies. And finally, and we'll talk about this a fair amount over the next 25 minutes. The population structure of dogs is very well suited to genetic studies because of that division of dogs into breeds. Now, people always ask me, where did modern breeds come from and when? Well, dogs originated in the old world, their sister to the Eurasian Great Wolf. They're from an ancient now extinct lineage and they were the only large carnivore to be domesticated. Now that probably took place about 25,000 years ago. So evolutionarily, that is just the tiniest, tiniest drop in the bucket. And that really works in our favor as we seek to identify genes behind all of these interesting traits. But if you go to the dog park and you look around, most of the modern breeds that you're seeing were created during Victorian times. There are about 350 breeds that are recognized worldwide. And the American Kennel Club, which is the largest registering body in the United States, recognizes just about 200 with one or two new ones added every year. So if you were to ask me, put that down there, if you were to ask me why I've devoted the last 30 years of my career to studying dogs, I could really sum it up in one word and that word would be diversity. Dogs have an extraordinary level of diversity as we look across breeds. In terms of body size over here on the right, you know, dogs are actually the most morphologically diverse land mammal on the earth. In terms of behavior, we all know stereotypic breed behaviors. For instance, this herding dog here, herding sheep, a border collie. Disease, dogs get all the same diseases we do on the lower right here. This is actually a melanoma and it presents and is treated in response to treatment pretty much the same way in humans and dogs. And some of the traits we're really curious about like hair curl and fur curl are controlled in part by some of the same genes. Loss of hair alopecia controlled in part by some of the same genes in dogs and humans. So as we learn about the underpinnings of different traits in dogs, we're really learning about ourselves. And that's one of the things that makes it so exciting to do dog genetics. I don't know why this keeps happening. Not sure why this keeps happening, but we'll try it again. All right, there we go. All right, now when we think about dog breeds and there are several shown for you here on this slide. Within breeds, there's a lot of homogeneity. All these dalmatians look the same. The bass and hounds look the same. The bernie's mound dogs look the same. And within their genome, there's a tremendous amount of homogeneity or likeness from dog to dog. But when we look across breeds, there's a lot of physical heterogeneity, behavioral heterogeneity, disease susceptibility, heterogeneity. And not surprising, there's a lot of heterogeneity in their genomes as well. So a couple of things to keep in mind during this talk. All dogs, no matter what breed, are members of the same species. Canis lupus familiaris, no matter how different they look. My lab is in a long-term partnership with dog owners, dog breeders, dog lovers, veterinarians. We don't keep any dogs in kennels or in labs. We don't breed dogs. We don't direct any readings. Ours is really a citizen science project. And on any given weekend, if you're at a dog show, a specialty event, an agility trial, an obedience trial, you're likely to find someone from my lab there participating. We collect and we store DNA from many, many different breeds, as many as we possibly can. And we've stored DNA thus far from about 45,000 dogs. So that's what's in my freezer so far. Now, this is work that was done by Heidi Parker starting in 2004, and it continues to this day. And Heidi's been interested in learning how different breeds relate one to another. So to execute this experiment, we went out and we collected DNA from lots of different dog breeds. This particular iteration has 161 breeds. We've now got about 300 breeds. We got 10 dogs from each breed, and we interrogated them at 170,000 different positions in the genome. And then we put it through a series of computer programs asking, how do these different breeds relate one to another? And what came out are 23 clades, and each clade is a different color. And they kind of make sense. You know, over here at about 10 o'clock are the terriers, the board of the Firefox, the Australian, the Silky, the Yorkshire, et cetera, et cetera. Down here in red are the spaniels. In the spring are American Cocker Field, so on and so forth. Over here in blue are the bully breeds, the Boxer, the Bulldog, the Boston Terrier, the French Bulldog. Now we are ever expanding this because it is vital, absolutely vital to the development and to the design of our experiments. Let me tell you why. So let's say a dog comes into your office with epilepsy. It's a fairly complex disease. We know there's lots of human genes, lots of dog genes. It's a Boston Terrier. Well, if I were just studying Boston Terriers, I wouldn't have a lot of statistical power. But I could add affected Boxers, Bulldogs, Miniature Bull Terriers, Staffordshire Bull Terriers, because you can see here in the blue that they all share a recent common ancestor. So all of those dogs likely have the same mutation in the same gene. I could do the same thing. A Scottish Terrier walks into my office with epilepsy. If I'm restricted to just studying Scottish Terriers, I'm limited. But I can add in all those other Terrier breeds affected dogs. And then I have a lot more statistical power. Now the gene affecting the Scottish Terriers, because again the Terriers all share a recent common ancestors, it's going to be different than what's going on in those bully breeds. But that's breed because it's a way to tackle the very complex problem human geneticists face of locust heterogeneity. There's lots of genes that are responsible for any given trait. But humans don't really come with very good signposts that say, we're this gene, we're this gene, we're that gene. But dogs do in the form of that breed structure. And the more we know about how breeds relate one to another, the more powerful our analyses can be. So let's start with disease. Okay, cancer. Many breeds have an elevated risk for specific cancer. So how does that help dogs? How does that help humans? Well, we know that osteosarcoma is very common in the long limb breeds, Scottish deer hounds, Irish wolf hounds, great Danes and so on. Bladder cancer is one we see in the Scottees and the Westies, as well as in the Shetland Cheap Dogs. And we'll talk about that in a moment. Histiocytic sarcoma, we see in Bernie's Mountain Dogs and plaque-hoda retrievers, extremely lethal disorder. And gastric cancer, also very lethal in humans and dogs. We see in the Belgian breeds and in the Chao Chao. These are all things that over time, my lab has studied. So let me give you the example of invasive urinary cancer. So this accounts for only about 1 to 2% of all tumors in the dog. But that's 50,000 dogs each year. So that's a lot of veterinary bills. That's a lot of distraught owners. At the time of diagnosis, 50% will have already metastasized to distant organs. Average survival is a year. And the most common treatments really have not changed in the last 50 years. Now, collaborating with Debbie Knapp, we've been able to do some really interesting things. In part, because look what happens when you look at risk for getting the disease in dogs. If you're a Scottish charioteer, your chances of getting the disease, your odds ratio, is 21-fold higher than the average mixed breed dog walking down the street. 21-fold higher. You just don't see that in humans. It's a geneticist dream. American Eskimo Dog, 6.5-fold higher. Shetland Cheap Dogs, 6-fold higher. So these are the kinds of things that genetic studies they're really made of in order to get the best, most rigorous, and most reproducible results. So let's look at the Shetland Cheap Dog. So we did a genome-wide association study of 49 cases and 50 controls. Now, in dogs, you don't have to collect hundreds of thousands of dogs. You couldn't find 100,000 Shetland Cheap Dogs, probably. I'm sure you couldn't. What matters is lineage. And the American Kennel Club has given us access to five-generation pedigrees of all the dogs that we sample. And so we're able to get a group of very unrelated dogs and capture most of the variation in the breed. You're looking at a Manhattan plot, and the alternating gray and black are the different chromosomes from one to 38 in addition to the X. Each dot represents an individual place in the genome that we've interrogated. And you see this nice bright red signal on canine chromosome 13. And that's telling us it's statistically significant. It tended the negative seventh, even after correction for population structure and all the appropriate things, that we have three sequential markers or single nucleotide polymorphisms that are telling us that there's a gene down there that's important in increasing risk for bladder cancer in the Shetland Cheap Dog. But now we're going to do the same thing I just talked about. We want more power. We want to refine that region. So we're going to add in more breeds. With the Shetland Cheap Dog, we had that p-value of 10 to the negative seven. But now I added in data from colleagues, affected Australian shepherds, affected border colleagues. And now my p-value goes up to 10 to the negative 10th. And importantly, when you're looking at that bottom panel, the region under the curve really contracts. The number of genes I have to look at that are likely candidates greatly, greatly reduces. So this is a very effective strategy that makes use of the data that you saw, the wheel that you saw on the previous slide. Now, months and months and months of work, I'll just give you a punchline. You know, the gene that looks to be the culprit in this particular case is NEPOL1. The coding variant is something that we see in affected dogs. If we just look at how common it is in dogs in general, it's very rare. Outside the clade, we see it in only .0001 dogs. And that's looking at genome sequence from 1700 dogs. The gene is involved in ion transport. The mutation is predicted to alter transmembrane domain protein. And our result is significant. Now, we applied a series of tools to look at pathogenicity, to look if it's a cancer driver, to look if it's overexpressed in bladder cancer cell lines. And the answer to all those things is yes. So this is really somewhere that we want to put energy in terms of understanding bladder cancer for dogs, but also for humans. This isn't something that popped up on human studies. So this now becomes an area of focus for human invasive bladder cancer as well. It has been looked at in human oral squamous cell carcinoma. And its expression is associated with poor survival and with metastases. So this is really a great place to spend our time. In the bottom panel, red and brown, we're just showing you that this is in an incredibly well conserved region of the genome. It's really only in this clade of dogs, this at-risk clade of dogs that we see this particular mutation. Now, this isn't the only gene we found. We've actually found several others. And just like in humans, cancer is not a one gene story for the most part in dogs. So there's another gene on chromosome 28 that increases risk if you have the correct allele. And combinations of those together with mutations that we found in genes on chromosome 4 and 9 and 21 can either increase your risk, as you see down here in the aqua cloud, they can decrease your risk as in the blue rectangle, or they can balance each other out and you really have no change in risk at all. So these kinds of studies take massive amounts of numbers and money to do in humans. And they become greatly, greatly simplified because of breed structure in dogs. Now, one other way to access genes that are important in disease, but also allow us to really study something that I've wanted to study for years and years and years and years. It's to study morphology across breeds. So we have been doing that since 2007 and we've identified genes that control body size across different breeds, height and weight, skull shape, leg length, coat color, as well as everything you would ever want to know about fur. In some ways, the body size has been really, you know, the coolest and the most interesting. So we've shown that about 20 genes are responsible for most of the variation in body size, going from the very smallest to our, to the very tallest of the Great Danes in Irish Wolfhounds, Scottish Deerhounds or big mass of dogs, the Newfoundlands, the St. Bernard's, the Lee and Burger. This is very different than what you see in humans. Hundreds of genes have been identified that account for variation in human height and human weight. So compare that to just the 20 we're seeing that account for 90% in dogs. So this is a recurring theme that we see in dog genetics, small numbers of loci of large effect responsible for traits, whereas in humans, it's large numbers of loci of small effect. And that really speaks to the evolutionary time period that dogs were domesticated in only 25,000 years ago. And the few hundred years that essentially most of the breeds that you're seeing have been developed by mixing and matching and very strong selection on the part of fanciers. So a very simple way to build an architecture for an otherwise very complex trait. And how does that relate to human health? Well, on this slide, I give you an example for two genes on the X chromosome. So this is a heat map and across the X axis are a number of genes that we found are important in dog body size. On the Y axis is standard breed weight, 10 to 15 pounds, 15 to 20 so on and so forth. The red indicates a derived allele. So when you don't see in wolves, but you can see in dogs, the yellow indicates an ancestral allele. You can see it in dogs, but you always see it in wolves. By and large, if you look at little dogs, you know, 5 to 10 pounds, little breeds, Chihuahuas, Pomeranians, all those, they all have the derived allele, but that flips when you get to the X chromosome. And these last two genes are on the X chromosome. One of us is a gene called IGSF4. We see that derived allele in 90% of really big breeds, some of the medium breeds, but not the small breeds. What does gene do? Well, it's involved in thyroid hormone pathway. It's mutated in humans associated with obesity, associated with certain cancers associated with Alport syndrome. So here's something breeders have been doing in order to make dogs of a particular aesthetic. And in doing so, they've created an opportunity to look at variation in genes together with phenotypes or traits or diseases. We really care about for human health and biology. Another example, ACSL4, this is responsible for back fat thickness. So you do see that in an English master if you wouldn't see it in a great day. So it pops up over here on the heat map and just a subset of breeds. What does it do? It has a role in lipid biosynthesis and fatty acid degradation. When otherwise perturbed in humans, it's important in metabolic syndrome. It's important in insulin resistance. Same deal. This is something that breeders have been doing to make dogs of a particular aesthetic that then becomes a system for studying things that are important in human health as well. Now, no discussion would be complete if I didn't also talk about behavior. And you can just look at this slide and I can just say sight hounds, sled dog, herding dog, pointer, draft dog retriever, and a visualization comes immediately to mind. Because these are really breed stereotypic behaviors. They're by and large untrained. They're things that dogs are going to do no matter what. Now, I've been really interested in border collies. It's in fact the reason I started the dog genome project over 30 years ago. And I've always wanted to know what makes herding dogs herd. And it's, it's something that I've revisited several times over the last 30 years. But it's really been in the last couple of years when just a wonderful post doc, Emily Dutro joined my lab. And she tackled it really interesting and novel ways with novel tools that we've been able to make some progress on this. So the work has been published in Cell. And again, you know, about a year and a half of work takes us to this slide. And Emily has shown that axon guidance genes, those things responsible for axon outgrowth axon attraction axon repulsion are very strongly associated with that herder lineage. Now, on the bottom is another one of those Manhattan plots, and all those genes in green are things that we've shown are statistically significant important in this herder lineage. And when we look at this in terms of a pathway presentation, you can see that these genes affect all different areas of axon guidance. These are by and large genes that are important in early brain development. So truly, these are things these dogs have been programmed to do very, very early on. So how do they work? How do they affect herding? Well, you know, we don't know for sure. But as always, we have some ideas. So many of the genes are part of effron signaling pathway. And effron five, the signal, this is blown up the area under the curve, you can see this nice signal. Effron three is to the far right. And again, you can see the very nice signal. Effron five, for instance, has 18 variants and they're present in 77% of all border follies, but only 7% of non border collie breeds. And that's looking at over 200 breeds. So how does that gene contribute to herding? Okay, here's our newest hypothesis. Well, we know effron five and its ligand are implicating anxiety and maternal pup gathering and mouse models. So when it's knocked out in mice, the mothers don't gather their pups together. They don't pull them together into that nice tight group. So one thought is that the herding drive may involve augmentation of the same anxiety associated pathways that drive maternal protection behaviors. So we have lots and lots of functional work to do to explore that. But it's one interesting way to think about these genes. And Jamin Kim published a couple years before that interesting paper in PNAS and Jamin was interested in something different. He was interested in hunting. So the sport hunting breeds bred to assist hunters by retrieving by flushing by pointing requires very prolonged periods of physical activity versus terrier breeds employed to rid land or buildings of vermin requiring short rapid bursts of activity. So how are these two things accomplished at the genetic level? Well, again, you know, a couple of years of work and then he had a nice paper in PNAS. And he showed that there were genes important in neurologic function muscle for instance muscle contraction muscle mass muscle development and cardiovascular genes things important in vascular smooth muscle contraction for instance. And that's not surprising because, you know, several years early joiner and coil had written that elite athletic performance is largely determined by the integrative roles of muscular cardiovascular and neurologic functions. So let's look at a couple of examples. All right, myostatin and TRP and three. So myostatin is when it's knocked out it dramatically increases muscle mass and, and that's been shown in in Whippets. And, and they're normally that lean almost anorexic looking dog and in the lower two panels you can see these are dogs that myostatin has been knocked out, and they have this very muscular appearance. And that dramatically improves their racing speed essentially by an entire grade and we went and collected samples got racetrack reports and all those sorts of things in order to show that TRP and three mutations in that gene those dogs run almost 27% faster. So a couple of genes dramatically improve racing performance. How about Robo one this is neurologic. This was actually fun because we went and sample dogs at obstacle courses. So we looked at number of agility trials one by each breed versus total number of dogs registered for each breed. And remember obstacle courses you have to run turn stop jump. These really fast rapid movements. And then we did a case control. A candidate gene study using whole genome sequence from 92 breeds and we we looked at the best performing and the worst performing dogs and Robo one variance jumped out there significantly associated with greed specific agility performance. So what does the gene do well it plays a role in regulation of neuronal migration and development. It's an axon guidance and growth gene in humans however the genes associated with a form of developmental dyslexia it's a common learning disability and it's associated with translating visual cues. So this makes sense right because in dogs Robo one seems to affect the ability to identify and learn environmental information, such as obstacle courses and each time the dog runs the course it should get faster and faster and faster. And that's what that gene is important for. But this is very cool because now we have a non invasive and very simple system to match variance in the gene with the different aspects of performance. And so this is really a classic example of how we can use dogs to study these nuances of behavior in ways that inform us about what dogs are doing but human health and biology as well. So in closing I'll just say that you know there's so many other things I would have loved to tell you about rehab studies on the ground in Chernobyl. As you know catastrophic accident 1986 releasing radioactive cesium iodine plutonium 117,000 people evacuated most personal belongings were left behind, including sadly pets. So as of 2017 there were 800 dogs that lived in and around Chernobyl, and there are dogs living in the reactor there are families of dogs living in the spent fuel rods, just extraordinary. So at the invitation of the Chernobyl nuclear power plant authority, working with with colleagues in turn in Ukraine, as well as the University of South Carolina health clinics were set up to Spain neuter vaccinate chip and offer medical care to these stray dogs. And so we've been able to get samples from about 400 of them. And the bottom left is Gabby Spatola graduate student in my lab at Chernobyl collecting samples, working at one of these space neuter clinics. And so the question we want to answer is what are the genetic changes that have occurred that allow this population of nearly 800 dogs to survive and propagate for about 15 generations in and around this nuclear power plant and Gabby's published one paper so poor and she's got some great results that are coming down the pike. We study aging and dogs as do other people wanting to understand the difference between chronological age how many years you've lived versus biological age the percentage of of how far along are you. Dogs are a great system in which to study this because some breeds live a long time some breeds live very short times. And there's also an association with weight, big dogs just don't live as long. The Lee and burgers the dog D Bordeaux again your new and your St. Bernard's maybe six, seven, whereas some of these small breeds toy poodles, Pomeranians, all those guys, they can easily live up into their early 20s. So we and other labs are certainly tackling that. And this is made ever more possible by a consortium that I've been leading the dog 10 K consortium. It's an international effort to to generate now live sequence from eventually 10,000 different canids. We just published our first paper in genome biology, and it includes all different kinds of dogs were not limited to breed dogs. The idea is to allow the wider community to do some of the things you're interested in study agent study behavior morphology health domestication and conservation as well because we've been collecting wolves and coyotes. And all samples are processed in the same way we've made all of our data and processing pipelines available prior to publications and there's now about 4000 sequences available. So I hope I've convinced you that dogs are a fantastic opportunity to do work with the general public on a family member that they love dearly to study the genetics of so many different things. You know, numbers are an advantage. The fact that most traits are controlled by small numbers of genes are an advantage. Cancer is certainly a place where a lot of emphasis has gone as well as behavior. And, and, and the dogs of Chernobyl project is in my lab I think one of the most interesting because it shows how dogs act as a sentinel for environmental exposures. And we continue to press with this idea that data and means to analyze data should be available to everyone. So I'll stop talking there his recent picture of my lab plus one, you have to stare a little closely but you can probably figure out who the plus one is. And I'll take some questions. If we have some time. So we do have some questions coming across that I will ask you shortly. Sure. Oh, okay. We don't have them yet. What can I can I I'll ask one. What did you can you reveal some of what you found with the Chernobyl dogs, as far as how they were able to live in that environment. So, the first thing we had to do is understand their population structure because we have samples from dogs that have been living in Chernobyl city which is about 15 kilometers away. We found dogs that are living in Pripyat one of the abandoned towns it's about one and a half kilometers away. And then dogs that are living in the reactor itself. And we found the dogs in the reactor pretty much stated themselves they really don't go out and made or cross her or go over to Chernobyl city. Dogs from Chernobyl city have intergression from other breeds presumably from workers that have been bringing dogs in. They have a background of, for instance, Eastern European German shepherd. But the dogs inside the reactor. Don't really have much, much more than than that. A little bit from some some Russian dogs but really not much more than that. And so, what we have found is that this is a much harder problem than we thought in our simplistic worldview we thought well we'll just. Compare the genomes of dogs living in the reactor from dogs that don't live in the reactor. And it turns out that doesn't work because their population background is really very different. So you get all kinds of false positives and that which is very easy to do right I mean you have to be so cognizant of this issue of population structure. So now what we've had to do is get dogs from all over Eastern Europe which people have been great about sending us we've gotten lots and lots from Poland. We've been sequencing those and we're using those as our control populations. We've also found that when we look at the genome we can identify lots of families, because we've been collecting over several years. These dogs only live to be a couple of years old. We don't know if that's the radiation exposure or that's that they live in an incredibly harsh cold food deprived environment, even though the clean futures fund continues to drop food off for these dogs every month. So we're focused on those sorts of issues to design the right experiment and figure out what the underlying genes really are. But it's turned out to be a much more complex experiment and just highlights. You, you really have to think about population structure or you can get answers you want you can get all kinds of false positives. Thank you. So I've learned that there are no questions on Slido. So I open it up to the other board members and speakers if you have any questions that you would like to ask Dr. Ostrander. Go ahead. Hi son at Yonker. I'm wondering how much acceptance of genetic engineering is. There is for companion animals or like you showed those. Greyhounds are. Yeah. How much, how much is that happening in dogs across various domains where you find dogs. So genetic testing. Dog owners love it. Dog owners have completely embraced as we, as we find genes responsible for traits. So the company scooped those up and offered genetic testing and that's been wholly embraced by breeders who use it in order to design their breeding programs. So that and that's been true for a long time. Genetic engineering, not at all. So the dogs that the whippets that that had the mutations and myostatin were actually found by accident a breeder contacted us and said, look, I'm getting these weird looking whippets, and I don't know what to do about it. What's going on. And we got samples and looked at them and then we went down to the racetrack and said, Oh, yeah, there are some down here and those dogs race really, really, really well. So we haven't seen dog breeders then embrace that like we haven't seen the greyhound community say, Oh, okay, we want to put that gene. You know, we want to breed it in or CRISPR into all of our dogs so that they'll do better. Haven't seen that at all. And for sure the American Kennel Club is very much against that sort of thing. And those dogs would not be allowed to be registered which is kind of the holy grail the dog world so that's where it stands right now. I presume that the breeders are using that information to breed out disease traits. Yep. Absolutely. Absolutely. Is there any thought about doing that artificially doing it artificially you mean by by creating dogs with with engineered genes to prevent. Yeah, no, they really haven't been doing that you know there's been just a flood of genetic tests coming out. And so dogs are tested. We give a lot of lectures that say, don't take anyone who's a heterozygote completely out of your breeding program, because you're going to narrow your gene pool. If you throw out all your heterozygotes and you know something else is going to pop up so we've been a lot of educational researchers to breed clubs all over the country. And so, you know, breeders incorporate that that information and that genetic testing into their breeding program. I don't know of a situation where someone has developed a designer dog or CRISPR dog, and then use that to sort of speed up that process. They always have dogs in their breeding program that they can test or someone else does in the community that doesn't have whatever the offending gene or offending allele is. And so, you know, that's what that's what they use that's what they incorporate into their breeding programs. So I don't know if any situations like that. And again, you know, it's people talk and it's a small community, and those dogs would not be able to do that research. So, in that world of dog breeding, what would be the point. Yeah. Yes, hi, thank you. That was a wonderful talk. I have wondering, you know, what you see as the barriers or the successes in this kind of research translating over to to human health. There are specific examples that I I've always been really interested in but don't necessarily see that much uptake on the human side. One is the connection between the brachiosophallic skull morphology and glioblastoma, which I understand is a pretty significant linkage. And the other is just this natural experiment of we we in North America spay our female dogs as part of responsible pet owner. And my understanding is in Scandinavia, they don't and that seems like a natural model for, you know, mammary carcinoma risk and breed differences. So I'm just, I guess I'm wondering with those kinds of incredibly important issues for human health, and those kinds of almost low hanging fruit, if I can put it that way, are there is it happening and I would love to hear what you think. So the, the issue of spay neuter which of course is what responsible owners do here in the United States. And by and large is not done nearly to that degree in Europe, particularly in in the in the Nordic countries. We and others have started looking at, you know, collections of dogs from the US and then looking at the same breed in Europe so we just had a paper out on the Bernie's Mountain dog. And so these mountain dogs, a quarter of them are going to get histiocytic sarcoma, all of them are going to die who get it, all of them are going to. And so we have samples from burn we have samples from the US and, and, you know, following those dogs prospectively is of course really important, just to see what these different populations are because they really haven't blended really haven't, haven't crossed. And so for things like, you know, mammary cancers and, and prostate cancers and things like that this obviously becomes even more important. I don't have seen, I haven't seen papers come out about it yet. But I know people are thinking about it. I do have to say that in the show dog world, dogs are not spay or neuter. So in order to be able to show your dog, they have to be intact. And then dogs who do well and dog shows, especially males, you can freeze hundreds of shots of sperm on these dogs, right. And you can register the progeny of artificial insemination. So one really spectacular male dog, for instance, winds at Westminster can produce litter after litter after litter after litter, the good and the bad of that dog gets propagated, right. And so it's a really weird breeding structure and we are very fortunate the American Kennel Club has been very generous with making, you know, you know, records available to us. And quite honestly, every breeder I think we've ever asked has given us more information about their dogs pedigree than we would ever, ever, ever imagine knowing or wanting. So those things make it a little bit more complicated because the only way to get pedigree data is using AKC registered dogs. Most of our work is done with AKC registered dogs, so most of those dogs are intact. So I think people like Eleanor Carlson at the Broad, who have much more of an all comers citizen science project are in a much better position. I think to tackle, to tackle some of those issues. You know, breaky Seth Lee. It's really interesting. This is something that we started in my lab and the postdoc who did it now has his own lab at Edinburgh and he continues to, to, to work on this and I think what he's found is, this is a hard problem because it's a multigenic like anything out there. This isn't going to be a single one off story. But, you know, you see these associations between morphologic traits and diseases and you know they're all over the dog world, and the degree to which it's an association or it's causative can be very difficult to figure out and so I think that's where several of these sorts of things are at. Caroline. Hi, Caroline Zeiss. You know, so dogs have been very successful pre clinical models for some human diseases. Approval of certain drugs for people. Now that you've discovered all of these candidate genes. Do you see much appetite for those being used to create research colonies which really takes the dog out of the citizen science realm and puts it back squarely as a pre clinical laboratory animal species. Um, no, in short, I'm going to say. No, I don't. So, you know, in some cases we, they're not candidates that we have actually found the underlying mutation. I mean, you know, be rough as a good example and bladder cancer. Most dogs have a mutation in, in be rough in their, in their tumors. It's a somatic mutation. So it becomes a really good target for treatment. So what we hear veterinarians and oncologists saying to us is, oh, okay, this gene. What's known about it in, in human health. And then let's go ahead and set up trials and, and look at this in our clinic patients in dogs who are really appropriate to be enrolled. Now I'm not a clinician. And so I know that that's a broad statement. It comes with lots of caveats, but there are clinical trial networks in, in the dog world. Amy LeBlanc runs one of them for, for cancer with a big emphasis on glioblastomas and other similar cancers. And these are, are none of, none of these are colonies that are being developed and, and bred and then used for, for doing these sorts of clinical trials. So he has really been to keep it in the realm of citizen science. Will that change, you know, is, is certain genes are found or certain diseases are, are tackled. I don't, I don't, you know, I don't know. For now there's really been an emphasis for really the one health approach, which I know other people will talk much more eloquently about than I possibly could, and, and, and making use of data and drugs that are out there for treatment of humans and seeing what would apply best to the dog situation. Dr. Ostrinder, I've got one last question for you and this is coming from the ether. The all of us program is exhibiting here at the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences. Any thought of studying pet dogs of the people in that study as a comparative exposure. Yes, yes, yes. Well, we absolutely, we absolutely have talked to the all of us program. For exactly that reason, you know, wherever they are, we want to get samples of the dogs for sure, and figuring out how to make it happen. You know, we're not there yet, but I think everybody recognizes the benefit of doing that. And I'll just say in closing, you know, we collect dogs from all over the world. I have a slide I didn't put up world map everywhere you can imagine. But if you have an interesting dog or an interesting breed, send, and send me an email contact me. And right now we're very interested in collecting dogs from Africa, which is really underrepresented in all of our studies. So if you have connections there for us for veterinarians, you know, they're please contact us as well. Thank you everybody. Thank you, Dr. Ostrinder. We really appreciate it. Well, welcome back everyone. We are now in our post lunch session of the basket meeting, and we are really excited to now feature five phenomenal panelists who will be speaking to us on a pretty wide range of topics that all are part of Basker, and following their presentations, we're going to have a conversation together, a discussion. So please use the Slido to send us your questions and we'll have a conversation afterwards. So we will, I should say we will have room time for maybe one or two quick questions between speakers, but most of the denser part of the conversation will happen afterwards. So with that, let me direct your attention to the list of speakers for this afternoon. I should mention that an earlier version of this there were some errors so we want to make sure that everyone sees the speakers. I think I'll just quickly review who we have. Today we have Dr. Claire Hankinson, University of Pennsylvania, Cynthia Smith, National Marine Mammal Foundation, Tracy Goldstein, One Health Institute at CSU, Steve Asofsky, with Cornell Wildlife Health Center at Cornell, and Irvina Watson from the US Department of State. And we will start with our first speaker who will be Dr. Hankinson speaking on perspectives on the care and welfare of research animals. Let me offer a brief bio on her. Will this stay on? She is a veterinarian and Associate Vice Provost for Research and Executive Director of the University Laboratory Animal Resources at the University of Pennsylvania. She's an attending veterinarian and faculty member at the Professor of Laboratory Animal Medicine within the Department of Pathobiology at the School of Veterinary Medicine there. She obtained her veterinary degree from Purdue, completed her graduate work and residency at University of Washington, and then became a diplomat of the American College of Laboratory Animal Medicine. She has many professional connections and associations and lots and lots of leadership. I think I'll end the bio and turn things over to Dr. Hankinson. Thank you very much. Thank you very much. I'm just going to move to screen share and hopefully all the tech. Oh, I can't. There we go. I'll try again. There we go. Great. Thank you so much. It is really an honor to be here. And I am delighted to have this opportunity to present at the inaugural launch of Asker and to be with all of my colleagues here. I am getting a joint audio. Do I need to do that? Okay, I will exit. Thank you. All right. Well, first and foremost, these are I guess the requisite disclaimer. These are views that represent my own here today and are based upon many years of reflection and discussion with colleagues that are veterinarians, animal care staff, professionals, committee members, and scientists. And when we had our planning call, the request was to share some degree of history around animal welfare. And then as panelists, we were each asked in our own disciplines to touch on some of the current and future challenges. And I'll be incorporating those throughout the slides. All right. So I thought since I am talking about research animals, it would be helpful to start with a definition. And so what we have here is really any vertebrate animal, this is how it's defined in the regulations, any vertebrate animal, traditional laboratory animals, ag wildlife aquatic species, etc. That are produced for or used in research, teaching, testing or production medicine. You may notice that I have a non vertebrates on the far right. Anyone was doing a little inspection there. But that's because cephalopods are becoming more and more important in our global discussion around coverage of species. Scientists use animals to learn more about health problems that affect both humans and animals, and we use them to assure the safety of new medical treatments. Some of these problems involve processes that can only be studied in living organisms. And when we don't have an alternative, we would use laboratory animals or animals and research to meet objectives. And many of the animals that I work with personally in my world are bred specifically for use in research. So I wanted to touch on the three Rs. I'm hoping most of our audiences familiar with the three Rs of replacement reduction and refinement. These were developed some 50 years ago now as a framework for human animal research. They have subsequently become embedded in national and international legislation regulating the use of animals and scientific procedures. Opinion polls show that they are incredibly important across the world for people when they think about the public in particular the use of animals in investigations. Today, the three Rs are increasingly seen as a foundation for conducting high quality science and they have evolved in terminology and I want to thank NC three Rs for having this available on their website. So what were relatively brief pronouncements and definitions around what these three words mean, they've become much more expanded, progressive and applicable still in our world today. And so I direct anyone who would like to learn more about those specifically, I'll refer to them again throughout the talk but you can you can find much more at the NC three Rs website. So when they came out in 1959 I and in the spirit of sharing a little bit of history around animal welfare. There were a lot of concepts that came after the three Rs and it's important to emphasize these, I feel because they synergize closely with the three Rs. So first the five freedoms, they were released in 1965 in the UK, they outlined five aspects of animal welfare that are under human control. The UK government wanted these to really focus on livestock husbandry, and they didn't actually get formalized until about 1979 so quite a long time before adoption by the UK Farm Animal Welfare Council. The government principles were released in 1985 I'll give a little more detail about those they were nine incredibly impactful statements. They came out, they're available if anyone is interested in looking at them in the guide and they can also be looked at online. So I'll come back to those but that was 1985 which is a really important year that I'll return to some additional concepts around the three Rs were looking at the sex as a biological variable and they coined the four C's at that time. And since then we've had the concept of the three V's validation construct validity scientific validity internal validity. This was a paper that came out just a few years ago as well to think really about the harm benefit analysis and our role in that decision making process. I'll come back to as far as a challenge just to put a star here for us to put a pin in it. I'll come back to the sex of biological variable. Just for a little bit of brevity on that people haven't been aware of that before women now account for about half of all participants in NIH supported clinical research. However, more often than not basic and preclinical biomedical research is focused on male animals and cells. So this was an effort in order to account for sex as a biological variable with the development of research questions and study designs to reflect that. So as I mentioned, it was incredibly important to have the nine US government principles and I want to take a moment to go through them because they are now 40 some years old or about 40 years old. And there, I hope everyone will agree with me as I go through these. These are so really important aspects of animal welfare and challenges that we are addressing across our country within our discipline and I'm sure many others as well. We'll touch on this today, how we transport our animals and making sure that we adhere to the guidelines and policies and laws compliance overall. Any procedure that uses an animal should consider the relevance to human and animal health and advancing knowledge and the good of society. So that harm benefit analysis was was very prominent again in 1985 when these were coined. We want to avoid or minimize discomfort to stress and pain. So this is very much in the spirit of refinement. We want to make sure we have the most recent technologies and innovations for drug interventions. And with the respect to reduction, we want to consider the minimum number of animals that will answer the question and also consider alternatives that are non animals. Back to veterinary approaches, we want to make sure the drugs are modern and useful, effective. And euthanasia of animals, which is a constant part of the work that we do as veterinarians as veterinary technicians in the veterinary world, we want to make sure that we're using the appropriate methods to do that as well to limit any excessive pain or suffering. Veterinarians are expected to be involved in these decisions and looking at sort of environments and enrichment for the animals. And we absolutely need to make sure that people working with animals are trained to do so. And then the last which all, which was really, really a major change to what had happened before the government principles came out was the establishment of the institutional animal care and use committee. So the decisions around these nine principles was not to rest just with scientists alone, but it should have been a stakeholder group, if you all, that would review the work with the animals. So to give a quick overview for the IACUC, as I mentioned, 1985 was when this came into play. It's become its own entire career path in and of itself. I think many people are probably aware of that. We look at all of the animal use activities and any changes to those activities. We ensure compliance with animal use procedures and there's a lot of language around post approval monitoring now. We will look at reviewing the facilities and program every every six months. We make sure that there is a robust training program not only for the IACUC members themselves, but also anyone who works with animals. And we are reviewing care concerns about the care and use of animals at all times and very importantly balancing the use of animals, the welfare of animals with the research or project outcomes and objectives. And the IACUC has a lot of flexibility baked into it, even though it is supposed to be following and does follow so many regulations and I'll explain how this has gotten more complex over time. But there's been some critiques around the fact that IACUC are not consistent in their deliberations and they are not consistent because they're made up of different people between institutions. And there's a little bit of a concern that we are heavily expecting them to be the arbiters of all things ethical. But I just want to make sure that as we go forward in this discussion and I do sit on more than one IACUC myself. The IACUC was never meant to be the the ethical body completely for animal science and scientific merit. So again, just just to as we have the conversations today, there are many, many people at the table that have a voice and opinion in that and we want the scientific community to be aware of how we balance the harm and benefit for animal use. This has even led to additional many papers. This is just one of them by my colleague Stacy Pritt about how ethics animal welfare in the oversight can help with with overview and reproducibility of animal studies. So getting information about how we are going to take care of animals. We have numerous textbooks. Most of these are in the lab animal medicine and laboratory animal science field as well as dedicated scientific journals that are specific to our discipline as well. And we have our main book is called the laboratory animal just laboratory animal medicine. We have the fourth edition that's underway right now chapters are hopefully being written as we speak because I'm an editor and I need people to get their chapters in. So anyone who's out there just kidding. And then of course, as I mentioned, it's gotten more complex for IACUCs because we have so many regulations to follow. And these are all important and critical now in for large animal species. The USDA has Animal Welfare Act, there's inspection guides, the public health service policy, wildlife guidance as well, all very useful, but a lot of information for for us to have to follow as we're taking care of animals every day. So I want to take a moment to touch on the guide for the care and use of laboratory animals. I know that the next edition, which I think will be the 12th, if it's still called an addition when it comes out, but it would be sorry, it would be the ninth, excuse me. Is that right? The ninth. Yes. The ninth edition is is a really important document in the world of working with research animals. And there's been a discussion ongoing that I got permission to share a little bit sort of hot off the press news and this this will be coming out in a publication soon, hopefully by this group. They're the veterinary consortium for research animal care and welfare. And their mission that they had hoped to accomplish was to provide accurate information about the care and use of research animals in order to inform the public and as well as regulators in the scientific community about veterinary care and welfare for the species. So this became a parent from different groups that work in laboratory animal science and medicine. And I'll mention here that there are representatives from a clam, which is the American College of lab animal medicine, laboratory animal practitioners. A last resort national lab animal science meeting and the primate veterinarian group, as well as we have consultation from the National Association for biomedical research with Dr. Taylor Bennett, who also is a laboratory animal veterinarian. They conducted a survey over last year and into this year and the information that I'm going to share with you was just presented at one of our ACLIM forum meetings a couple of months ago. So what they asked was a series of questions and really was I'm not going to go into all those details so that you can wait and read that in the publication that comes out but they wanted to find out from interviewing the survey respondents, where they thought some changes should be made into the next edition of the guide. And so just to break this apart and mention to folks so chapter three and chapter two were the top areas that were suggested to be most in need of revision. And for those who maybe don't have the guide memorized to the extent of the chapters themselves the chapter two is the animal care and use program chapter three is environment housing and management. Chapter four is veterinary care chapter five is physical plant and chapter one is really kind of an introductory key concept chapter. So there's a there's a division here where most of the requests for a vision are coming into those those chapters two and three. And when this was broken down farther across the top 10 things that came out from the survey. It was related to how the animals are housed the enrichment that they have and the behavioral and social management. Thinking about for example how large should a cage be how tall should a cage be what different types of substrates will help to promote species specific behaviors. There's also aspects of husbandry the operations of the H back which is the facility systems ventilation and air conditioning. And then for aquatics as well this was interesting because we don't have very much in the current guide and there's a request to have more. So one of the just in the general data that I was given to share there about 531 responses to an option for open ended questions. And there were 200 some references added in that should be folks believe should be included in the next version of the guide. And so I wanted to just focus on this a bit that the number of respondents increased from left to right here the topics that that were hit remarked as being increasing as you had from left to right. But I wanted to emphasize which I think is really important for us today that there is a request to have more species and to look at wildlife and field studies and agriculture and aquatics as we mentioned. In addition compliance there's a lot of questioning around the maze the musts the shoulds and how we interpret those. And I'll come back to this but mental health as a component of working in veterinary medicine is also really really important topic right now public health topic as well and I'll explain a little bit about that as we go forward. So I think this is just interesting it's informative and I know that all of these groups are really excited and interested to see the progress that will be made from the Standing Committee for the next guy. So I wanted to just talk a bit about the challenge so I think in my role about what it will be like to incorporate the changes that are going to come in the next guide and it makes me kind of have to not have a little bit of a panic attack. So change management. We have been living through change management now for several years and dealing with COVID and when the guide comes it is going to be transformational and just taken very high level definitions from the Harvard Business School. Very large in scale and scope incredibly important and shifting how we think about our mission there's going to need to be a lot of strategy etc. So when we think about that wide of a change I thought it'd be useful to discuss a smaller change and I thought I'd go back to the concept of sex is a biological variable. These are these are things that hopefully you know this is supposed to be one initiative from the NIH for example that several years ago was thought to be something relatively easy to fix using a lot of males just start using a lot of females and and in your studies. No matter what the species and everything will kind of shake out from there. So again just for a little bit of background on this as I mentioned women are approximately 50% of participants in clinical research. But if we bring that back into pre clinical work. We just have not been seeing the same number of female animals used as male animals. And I'll just I'll just quote a little bit from this initiative so adequate consideration of both sexes and experiments and disaggregation of data by sex allows for sex based comparisons and may inform clinical interventions. NIH at the time that they released this expected that sex is a biological variable would begin to be factored into biological design. Analysis reporting invertebrate animal and human studies strong justification from the scientific literature preliminary data or other relevant considerations must be provided for applications that would propose to use only one sex. Investigators are strongly encouraged to discuss these issues with NIH program staff prior to submission. So we have gotten past the five year mark on this and a paper came out to look at how well things had gone. At the time of the guidance development there was a lot of resistance to this that the implementation of sex and gender policies. There was a lack of awareness about the importance lack of belief that this mattered and ultimately challenges just to have it launch at all. Good things that have come out the guidance is now in six languages. There is a much greater number of journals many greater number of journals that have adopted this and it's used it is being used extensively by researchers but we still have some critical barriers that I'll talk about here. So this is this is just a template that's come out for how a reviewer for a funding agency would look at whether someone has included appropriately sex is a biological variable. We will not be tested on this this is just to show the complexity of it but there remain concerns about mandating this because of financial expectations. I remember when this came out there are a lot of researchers that said I don't have the money to do this in my grants and will I get more money to basically duplicate the experiments with the other sex. Time burdens of repeating those experiments obviously graduate students postdocs people that had to move on with their careers that wouldn't be able to repeat things. I mentioned a resistance or lack of awareness amongst scientists as well grant reviewers. A lot of people just didn't think it had been so seated for so long that there were impacts that be used females that would be bias into the experiments that it was difficult to overcome that sort of what was ingrained culturally. And unfortunately what we're seeing is a persistent under representation of both sexes. So despite it being several years now it's it's still ongoing. And I thought it'd be useful to just quote something. This is a an editorial that came out in 2019 by Rebekah Shansky in science. She said the notion that a woman's disposition as a direct product of the activity in her ovaries persists today. Women but not men are still pejoratively described as hormonal or emotional which curiously neglects the well documented fact that men also possess both hormones and emotions. So I will stop there. It's a very good editorial. I would recommend it as I'm looking up at Abraham Lincoln staring down at me on the wall today. Yes. But importantly in this this long standing culture that women are more complicated men are more simple has infiltrated into animal research so that male subjects are going to be easier to work with and less complex than if you introduce the variabilities of the female sex. And therefore it's impacting preclinical research to the point that it's impacting clinical research and is deemed to be a public health concern at this point. So as we move forward then are we looking enough outside of the science at the animals themselves and as a veterinarian. This is just what I wanted to end the next few slides of the talk on. So we've continued to have many many advancements in the care and quality of life for research animals and I want to talk specifically about the care we have for the animals and the welfare. The work that we do is conducted by caring and devoted staff who want the best quality of life possible for these animals and it makes good sense because if we have animals that are enriched and are healthy then they should provide better or the best scientific data. But I want to make sure that we we touch on the fact that these two should get attention and certainly the next version of the guide and further regulations will help with this. We get a lot of criticism around the three hours the site that there's inherent harm to animals that's a fallout somehow of even rolling them in studies or a limited ethical review by the IACUC. But to that critique we have to respond with data and facts about the information gains that have been made in veterinary science and the involvement of veterinarians in virtually every aspect of contemporary animal use for research purposes. So for those who are on the call or in the room they're not veterinarians when we graduate we are expected to take this oath. And I just want to highlight one of the things we're expected to do is promote public health. We are also expected to advance medical knowledge for animals and humans and we have an ethical component to this as well. And what I liked when I've used this many times and talking to students and veterinary students undergrads over the years but now to with with the launch of this board the conservation of animal resources is also a mandate for us. And within the research realm we must have veterinarians there have to be at least one qualified veterinarians and registered veterinary technicians or nurses in order to implement the veterinary care program. We are there to help with disease prevention we are there to guide and consult with researchers who maybe don't have the veterinary background always promoting animal well-being and we work with the American Veterinary Medical Association. Many of us are members of that that's the overarching veterinary guidance group in the country who put forth the euthanasia guidelines. I wanted to touch briefly on our college so the American College of Lab Animal Medicine is the specialty organization for which laboratory animal veterinarians are given certification. And at this time it's one of the oldest specialties in veterinary medicine we do a certifying of the exam we do training programs and people can get into residency programs annually. I just got this these numbers yesterday from Dr. Mel Bach who is our executive director we have over 1200 active lab animal that's now. And 46 ACLAM recognized residency programs around the country including at my institution including at Dr. Disco's institution and I think a Dr. Bray institution as well. So one of the challenges that we're seeing that is of concern is a workforce issue. It was wonderful to have Elaine kicking off the conversation today about how many dogs are in our country. I don't I won't even ask for a show of hands how many people got a pet during the pandemic because there might be we have a unanimous here. But the challenges are still continuing to be a domino effect from that in that veterinarians were overloaded clinics were overloaded. The need for veterinarians has driven the salary price points in practice to an extent where I have had residents recently say although I've done an extra four years of training. I have too many debt burdens here I am going to go into practice because now I'm going to be paid a lot more and I'm going to get a signing bonus etc. This is happening not only in the lab animal specialty this is happening in multiple specialties. And it's disconcerting this this straight talk about workforce issues came from the AVMA summer meeting from the president of the AVMA saying it's tough now it's going to get better. So we have three veterinary schools that will be that are that have just come online that are going to be graduating students in the next couple of years. And shockingly to me 10 more veterinary schools that are proposed which will take care of the workforce issue and potentially start to bring down some of the temperature on how everyone's concerned that we don't have enough support. Talking about animal subjects themselves. This is something that I think is really critical because as a critique of the three hours when we say that we're going to be reducing animal numbers to zero animal rights groups would like to see no animals and research but we still have so much to learn about all these animals. This is just a sampling of the species that are here and and again to to the talk this morning about bats. I mean just it's just fascinating we have to make sure that we are rebuffing the societal pressure to reduce animal numbers and replace all animals from study. Studying animals for the sake of animals is a key consideration for many research proposals and these are the goals that are enmeshed in the progressive three hours. We do a lot of veterinary research we need to learn more about animals behavioral requirements her in both the talks this morning how much we have yet to learn about behavior and we have veterans are involved in that we need evidence based improvements for all of these areas. So I just I won't belabor this because we're running a little bit short on time. But I do want to remind everyone if you're asked if someone says to you at some point well you shouldn't be using more animals were supposed to be using less to abide by the three hours. That's actually not the spirit of what the contemporary definitions are we want to advance if you see at the bottom here advanced animal welfare by using the latest technologies and understanding the impact of welfare. So how do we tell the public about it. We're working on openness initiatives. There have been articles about this openness has been happening in multiple countries around the world we are a little bit late to the game. But I've been involved in the US animal research openness initiative for the last few years. They have a great new website that just has launched I hope people will take a look at it. Where you can learn more about it and we're trying to drive the public through this as well. In addition in trying to explain to the public the importance of the work we do I've been a part of launching the what if campaign this is just launched this fall. Where advocacy groups have worked with academic sites to come out with little icons really what if we what if we didn't have animals and research what if it stopped tomorrow. How would that look what would happen and they're for fish there for monkeys there for rats there for basic science as well. This is easy to sign up for I can help anybody get access to these it's a partnership between the Americans for medical progress the foundation for biomedical research states United for biomedical research. We have to counteract misinformation with fact and we have to do it in a little bit of a scare tactic way is what we decided we have to get on social media we have to let people know. That there would be huge downsides if we did away with animals and research. And in that spirit of what we do is Nobel Prize winning work. Well here's a list of all of the different Nobel prizes that came about from animal work including what has just we just come off the heels of all the announcements and the mRNA vaccine as well in 2023. The last thing I just want to touch on because we're finally talking about is that mental health piece and this is a welfare issue for people that work with the animals but also for the animals themselves because we need healthy people to work with animals to keep them healthy. I was really excited and a good way to see that David Grimm took this to science where he writes for them and talked about caring for research animals as a mental health tool. It really gave it a lot of a lot of optics and a lot of press. For those who maybe aren't aware of this term compassion fatigue it affects up to 86% of lab animal workers at some point in their career. It doesn't matter your gender it does not matter your age and it doesn't matter if you care for a monkey or a mouse it is a major piece of what we have to do because we are spending so much of our time having to euthanize animals. Here is just a quick definition. It's a low level chronic clouding of caring concern because you are having your compassion eroded, not just veterinarians also nurses people in the medical field as well. So we are addressing this in many ways at my institution we are pushing for a culture of care. And this is something that the article also talked about we have a lot of great guidance from the University of Washington that was highlighted in that article. And we've gone so far at my institution as to actually post a culture of care statement on the front of every animal facility that people are walking into. Because I hate to say sometimes we aren't really good to one another even in the facility spaces post COVID there's a lot of anxiety there's a lot of tension there's a lot of anger. And in order to treat people well who do what they do every day it serves as a moment of pause for that. And what I do try to remind our teams who maybe get down about what they're doing every day having to sometimes euthanize animals that they've cared deeply for in a research setting is that there is a bigger picture we're doing this for the benefit of others those who need treatments. There's a lot of support out in the advocacy world as well. And I think these are sometimes the highlights. So with that, since I'm launching into the next for the rest of the panel. I'm really proud to have been a part of this today. Partnership is going to be incredibly important for Baskar as it goes forward. I really like the new website so I just wanted to do a quick plug for this the mission statement and and I think there's just going to need to be a lot of people at the table I'm excited to see the expansion of ILR after 70 years. So with that, I will conclude. Thank you so much. Thank you for that truly wonderful and and illuminating talk. We have time for right now only one or two questions and just going to just put it out there and if anything has come through. If nothing has come through the portal, then we'll take from the group. So it's open to questions from people sitting at the table. Hi, Caroline Zeiss Yale. You know, we have found that putting the pressure onto an eye cook to assess the science puts them in a very difficult position. And in the end, the statement from the researchers and the eye cook as well it's already been funded. And yet we see all kinds of irreproducible science happening. So it's everyone's problem and nobody's problem. What is your thought on that. So I really appreciate that. I was fortunate enough to sit on the recent working group for NIH on regular reproducibility and there was an interesting amount of expectation that the eye cook could just sort of solve all the problems and at some point. I remember one of the research members of the panel said, well, we'll just put a statistician on every eye cook. I can't, you know, I can't imagine and even the statisticians. I mean, they're all going to view things differently. They're going to use different techniques and approaches to look at things. So I think we have unfairly pressured eye cooks, which is a little bit about why I want to put that article to show that it's there. There needs to be some balance around that eye cooks were never designed to be that to be that decider of what's appropriate science. I also want to offer, I took, I took this slide out in the interest of time, but because we have people at every level working with the animals, we're never going to have reproducibility. And it's something that we can set up every experiment to be exactly the same same bedding, same enrichment, same water change on the same schedule and every day, but the people change. And there's a really interesting body of literature that's coming out about how animals respond to people as they walk into the room, people that have interacted with them either positively or negatively. Observer bias of animals, pheromones, the odor of male experimenters, we will never get to reproducibility. So my counter to your question, which is really important is let's stop focusing on irreproducibility and let's focus more on generalizability. And that was a term that came out of that working group that we can generally apply because the human population isn't perfectly aligned. We get all, let me just, again, like we saw in the dog population, get all kinds of information that can be generally applied and that is still good information. I think we should probably move on and then we'll return to, I'm sure people have lots and lots of questions. So our next speaker is Cynthia Smith from the National Marine. The National Marine. The other, okay. Oops, that was came off. Sorry about that. It's not in the new version one second. I think I have it right here. Sorry. Dispensia. Thank you. All right, so apologies. So Dr Smith is a veterinarian DVM and is president and CEO of the National Marine Mammal Foundation. Which is based in San Diego, California. She has led this organization since 2010 and served as the chief medical officer for more than a decade. She is involved in a number of projects involving rain mammals at risk, threatened and critically endangered cetaceans are right of them has more than 25 years of clinical and research experience. She has contributed as a lead veterinarian for Noah's natural resource damage assessment of the deep water horizon oil spill, which we'll be hearing about today. And studying the long term impacts. He has many associations, just a few. She's a general program manager. She served as a general program manager for the Consortium of the Vakita Conservation Recovery and Protection. And has been involved with the US Navy's marine mammal program, you're going to be hearing about some of that. She received her bachelor's of science degree at Texas A&M, her DVM at Tufts with her thesis on aquatic biomedicine and she completed executive education at Harvard Business School, Harvard Kennedy School and Berkeley's high school of business. So we are excited to hear from you. Thank you. Okay. It's really a pleasure to be here. So thank you for the invitation. It's a wonderful setting. It's very inspirational just in itself to be here in Washington and then here in this building. So as you mentioned, in addition to being a leader for our nonprofit, I am a veterinarian and I specialize in marine mammal medicine, science and conservation. And so I'll be focusing today on a very different topic than our last one. And it's this concept of applying Navy dolphin medicine and I'll explain what that is to conservation medicine for small cetaceans and to really demonstrate this concept. I'm going to walk us through the case study of the Deepwater Horizon oil spill and very specifically the marine mammal injury assessment. So it's important to recognize the teams of scientists and veterinarians that have been involved in this investigation since 2010 and it began with NOAA's natural research damage assessment or NERDA. And that was followed by a multi-institutional and multi-agency collaboration looking into the health impacts of the spill on wild dolphins and whales, which was funded by the Gulf of Mexico Research Initiative, or GOMRI. This effort resulted in the creation of a scientific consortium for advancing research on marine mammal health assessments or CARMA, and it involved 12 different organizations, more than 12, including nonprofits, government agencies, veterinary hospitals, zoological organizations, and academic institutions. And then that gets us up till today. The Deepwater Horizon investigation is still continuing. And the University of St. Andrews, specifically Dr. Peter Tyak, is leading a large effort funded by CERDUP and the Office of Naval Research, and it's aimed at studying the cumulative effects of multiple stressors on marine mammals, and in this case, previous oil exposure. And so there's been years of rigorous science that have gone into this issue, and I really want to acknowledge everyone involved from the bench top, those that don't actually get to see the animals that they're working so hard to protect and understand all the way to the floating veterinary clinics that we pop up to study these incidents and animals. So before we dive into the case study, I'll just give you a really quick snippet on the National Marine Mammal Foundation, our organization, which is a 501c3 nonprofit based in San Diego, with a field station in Charleston, South Carolina. We have around 150 staff, including veterinarians, scientists, conservation experts, educators, and animal care specialists. Our mission is to improve and protect life for marine mammals, humans in the oceans through science, service, and education. As part of the mission of service, that service piece, we provide direct support to the US Navy's marine mammal program. This program has been around for more than 60 years. The Navy has been caring for a group of bottlenose dolphins and has been sustaining that population through when needed, through a very successful breeding program. And these animals live in San Diego Bay and then swim freely in the open ocean during training sessions in the Bay and beyond. Our nonprofit provides the medical training research and even environmental stewardship support to the Navy's marine mammal program, and specifically is looking to create science to inform the Navy on how to most responsibly navigate and operate in the ocean environment and how to best protect marine mammals. So we do a lot of different things for the Navy, but I want to focus today on the medical side and the scientific side of the house. So the Navy has had a rich history of contributing science to marine mammal, to the field of marine mammal medicine and conservation, with over 1,200 peer-reviewed publications since its inception. Our organization is only about 15 years old and we've contributed more than 300 so far. So it really speaks to the openness of this program in collaboration and into making sure that the animals are contributing in a meaningful way to the advancement of science. Pictured in the middle is Dr. Sam Richway. Some of you may recognize him. He has really been a force or was a force of nature. He was the father of marine mammal medicine. He sat on multiple committees for the National Academy of Science. We lost him last year, but his impact will certainly be felt for decades. All right, so let's get to the case study. So to fully demonstrate what we mean by applying Navy medicine to conservation medicine, we're going to walk through this event and we have to go back to April 2010 to do so. The explosion of the Deepwater Horizon drilling platform, the collapse of the rig and then the subsequent flow of oil resulted in the release of millions of barrels of oil in the northern Gulf of Mexico. Oil spread to more than a thousand miles of coastline from the western Louisiana coast to the Florida Panhandle and the total volume of oil released was about 12 times more than the Exxon Valdez. The surface oil footprint, which you can see here in this map on the left, overlapped with the known ranges of 21 species of dolphins and whales in the northern Gulf of Mexico. Previously, scientists really didn't think that the animals would be affected by oil. They thought they would avoid it, but this did not prove to be true. And over a thousand animals were seen visually documented swimming through the oil, and this included 10 species of dolphins and whales. There was no evidence of avoidance. We believe that cetaceans, which are our purposes, dolphins and whales might actually be more sensitive to the negative impacts of oil products coming off of different types of oil spills, and this is due to their very unique physiology. Dolphins, for example, have a straight and rapid intake of surrounding air directly into their lungs without the benefit of protective cilia or nasal turbinates. They also have about a 90% exchange of deep lung air with every breath. And when they dive, they come to the surface, exhale first, and then they inhale and then they dive. So while they're swimming around, they're holding on to that air. They also have double layer capillary beds, and all of these things we think may increase their susceptibility to oil and to chemical contamination in the environment. So NOAA's investigative teams after the Deepwater Horizon oil spill used a variety of methods to assess the potential impact of the oil spill on different groups of marine mammals. Oceanic species, coastal species, and bay sound and estuary species. So I'm going to be speaking to my personal involvement as one of the lead veterinarians on the investigation and to our organization's involvement, which we've been studying the impacts since it happened in 2010. Our primary focus has been on Barataria Bay, Louisiana. This was one of the heaviest oiled bays in the northern Gulf and really has been the place where we go back to really understand the long-term impacts of this spill. The marine mammal veterinary community as a whole was called upon to apply all that we had learned from either animals in human care, in our organization's case, from the Navy's marine mammals or to wild animals in different settings, and then applying those to the very rapid assessment of the wild dolphins living in Barataria Bay. We did this through catch and release health assessments. And over the first four years of the investigation, we handled more than 150 wild dolphins and did full physical exams. And you can see the list of the different tests that we did. All of these tests were worked out with animals in human care, specifically in our case, again, with the Navy's marine mammals. So these photos were taken from our folding laboratory during one of these catch and release health assessment studies. So I'm going to fast forward through the four years of very long and productive discussions and a lot of scientific investigation to really understand what, if any, impact the spill had on the animals. And we went in, again, with the thinking that perhaps there would be none. And we were proven wrong. There were quite a lot of negative impacts that we were documenting in the Barataria Bay dolphins in particular. So the key findings were first that the dolphins, Barataria Bay dolphins, were determined to be in poor health relative to other wild dolphin populations. And the next slide we'll talk more specifically about that. Second, in the aftermath of the spill, there was one of the largest unusual mortality events on record to date that happened in the four years following. So animals were not only washing up dead and then being examined for evidence of exposure, but we also had low survival rates in the regions that were impacted. And then finally we discovered impaired reproduction and we'll get into more detail about that as well. So when we focus on the key health findings and these adverse health effects in dolphins, we really looked at findings in both the dead and the live animals and where were we seeing consistency in the findings. And we had to go through a long process of ruling everything else out to make sure that we weren't tying findings to things that were not caused by the oil spill or oil exposure. And these included poor body condition, moderate to severe lung disease, adrenal system injury, which exhibited as an impaired stress response and perinatal loss. These are well documented in the peer reviewed literature and I've made some resources available if you'd like to read more about these. Then at the conclusion of the damage assessment, we realized that even though we had documented all these different adverse health effects, there was still much to be learned as new questions were emerging. For example, dolphins living within the oil spill footprint were experiencing high sustained rates of reproductive failure. We were only documenting 20% of the pregnancies to actually survive and result in a healthy offspring that is compared to about 67% on average throughout the southeast region. And then in addition, we were seeing evidence of chronic pulmonary disease and emerging cardiac effects in dolphins which had been previously documented in fish birds and humans. So I'm not going to go into all the different ways these findings were tied into human health in particular, but there was a great deal of parallels found. We wrote a paper specifically on that in comparison across taxa on the different findings, but there were certainly similarities between the human health findings and the marine mammal findings. So now we took that approach that I was that I started with and talking about applying our Navy medicine to conservation medicine and we really had to take it up a notch at this point in order to better understand the reproductive and cardiac health effects. In wild dolphins, we needed more advanced tools and techniques than we had on hand. So we had to then in response carefully examine where was their overlap between the needs for our Navy medicine and the needs for investigating these wild dolphin issues further. And as a result, we decided to really focus on enhancing our reproductive ultrasound techniques and our echocardiographic techniques. In 2016, we launched a multi institutional research effort that was funded by Gomery and began working with Navy dolphins to really refine these procedures so we could take them into the field. And so we just started to develop new fetal and placental ultrasound protocols that were completely modeled off the human reproductive ultrasound protocols. And then we ground truth them with the Navy's dolphins. We also went back in time and really examined with blood and ultrasound findings from Navy dolphins that had successfully given birth and then cared for their young and compared those to the findings from the occasional pregnancy that did not survive. And we actually went back 50 years to get as many as we could in the data set and really create a robust data set for this investigation. So these are just examples of a couple of papers that came out from that part of the study where we really wanted to use everything we have learned from the Navy dolphins. And then in both the reproductive and the cardiac settings and the pulmonary settings, which I'm not speaking about today, but but included a paper on that as well. And then we took it to the field. So we we and we got as good as we could at at it with dolphins and human care so that when we took it to the field, these techniques only took about 10 minutes each. So speed is extremely important when you're working with these wild animals. So we applied it to the wild animals and as a result we were able to rapidly evaluate the health of the developing fetus and the placenta in pregnant baritare Bay dolphins during this these very temporary catch and release health assessments. And we were able to also comprehensively evaluate their hearts by bringing two cardiologists with us into the field who helped us develop those protocols. At the conclusion of the study we had diagnosed placental dysfunction in the majority of the wild dolphin pregnancies in Barataria Bay. And we detected cardiac anomalies in several of the adults. So how did all of these health and reproductive effects actually impact the dolphin population as a whole. Dr. Lori Swacky who was at the time our director of conservation medicine and is now the science director at the US Marine Mammal Commission. She and a team of epidemiologists and population biologists really set out to determine what was the long term population trajectory knowing everything that we did. And she built a model which is in this paper if you're a modeler and want to read about how they did that. But she basically determined that it would take about 30 to 35 years for the population to recover from these health effects. And that is primarily based on the fact that these animals really needed to die off and the offspring needed to take over. That is assuming that there were no there are no additional pressures on the animals in the bay. So this is just talking about where they are today and how long it would take them as a population to recover. Again, that is if there were no additional pressures. There is a major restoration project that has been planned for Barataria Bay. So there this restoration project is called the mid-Barataria sediment diversion project. And although it is meant to help restore the region and restore some of the damage caused by the oil spill, it involves diverting fresh water from the Mississippi into Barataria Bay. This would carry sediment into the bay and should result in building back about 40 square miles of land over a 50 year period. In the process, the salinity of the bay will be intermittently and drastically reduced. It will hit zero parts per thousand. This we believe will cause great harm to the dolphins that are living in Barataria Bay and will add an additional pressure. We know that dolphins that are exposed to fresh water develop skin lesions often infection. It creates systemic and physiologic disturbance and eventual death. Again, the Navy animals were able to aid in our better understanding of how exactly would this impact the animals. There are a lot of questions about how long would it take, especially to help inform the management action, this restoration action, if you could actually control how long the bay was flooded with fresh water. And if we could understand when what are the critical time points for when do problems start to arise. So we looked at Navy dolphins that had actually spent time in different environments around the world and had been cared for by veterinarians during that time and looked to see when did it look like things were starting to change. That was fed into a bigger study where a lot of data was pulled in to better understand the fresh water challenge that these animals will be faced with. And again, Dr. Swacky was a key in this investigation. And unfortunately, the population models that have been built to study this are now saying that the proposed restoration activity will likely drive the Barataria Bay dolphins to extinction. It will take about 50 years, but that is the current trajectory. So following the publication of this model and the catastrophic decline, it predicts the US Marine Mammal Commission has declared Barataria Bay dolphins are now a species of concern. So with the primary threat being on this plan restoration activity. So I encourage you to read up more on this topic. It is a high priority topic in marine mammal medicine conservation and science. There are clear benefits of this restoration project to the community and to the land building the land backup, but there are also very clear consequences that are important to be aware of. So despite the gravity of the situation, there is some good news and I did want to just start to transition now into my final portion of the presentation and talk about some of the other good things that are coming out of all of this work that has happened over the last 12 years. During the most recent study where we were looking at multiple stressors on marine mammals and in the marine environment we set out to develop minimally invasive ways to age the animals. And we collaborated with the clock foundation in Los Angeles to develop an epigenetic aging technique where you can take blood or skin from a bottle nose dolphin and determine exactly how old it is. So we created with the Navy dolphins who have known ages and known health status, we developed a clock that we can now use to apply to other bottlenose dolphin populations and bring in samples and then determine how old is a specific dolphin. And then our next step is to determine what is that biological age of that animal so we can get the chronological age with great accuracy and now our next step is but how old is that animal really on the inside. And this is where the story really begins to expand because there are other bottlenose dolphins all over the world, not just here in the United States, not just in Barataria Bay. And there is one bottlenose dolphin in particular the lehiel's bottlenose dolphin that lives only off the coast of South America. It is an at-risk species and there's only about 600 dolphins left. So we're collaborating with experts in Brazil and we are starting to build population age structures for them. And we're also hoping to understand through the biological epigenetic analysis how the pressures that they're under in Brazil could be influencing their decline off the coast of South America. The lehiel's dolphin is just one of seven high priority species of small cetaceans as identified by IUCN's integrated conservation planning for cetaceans group or ICPC. And so this map shows the seven different species that they've identified are at our species of concern and their general location, although their distribution can be quite broad. And these species weren't necessarily chosen because they're the most critically endangered. Although some of them are, but rather the consideration given to multiple factors including politics, cultures and species expert opinions. So these are species where we think if we work together in both an NC2 and XC2 way, we can bring all this knowledge we have learned from animals in human care and around the world. Apply them to these species and actually make a difference in filling critical data gaps. So in response and to circle back to the topic of the presentation today, our organization's really been looking for meaningful ways to apply our Navy medicine, our managed animal medicine to the conservation of wild at-risk porpoises dolphin whales. And so we decided to stand up a new initiative called Operation Grace, the global rescue of at-risk cetaceans and ecosystems, which aims to take our veterinary and our conservation expertise and apply it to as many at-risk species as possible, focusing on those seven that the IUCN's ICPC group has identified. So I'll just show you and I'll wrap up here by showing you a two-minute video. Please note that this video was created to engage the public, general public audience, but I hope that it will paint a picture for the board of what we're attempting to do and the approach that we're taking. So I'm going to mute here because I believe the sound's going to come through, so we'll see how it goes. Am I not? It's mute. From the Americas to Asia, Africa and beyond, urgent action is needed. The National Marine Mammal Foundation is answering this call with Operation Grace, the global rescue of at-risk cetaceans and ecosystems. As a leader in marine mammal science, medicine and conservation, our veterinarians and scientists are joining forces with local and global experts to help save these animals. Through a proven, integrated approach to conservation called the one-plan approach, we are combining knowledge, aligning international efforts and building local capacity to support long-term solutions that benefit both animals and people. To maximize our impact, we are addressing critical conservation challenges with a 360-degree view of the animals, their ecosystems and the human communities that rely on them. But we can't do this without your help. Support Operation Grace to ensure that the animals on the brink of extinction will be around for our children to cherish tomorrow. Together, we can empower communities around the world in the fight to save endangered species. Together, we can protect and preserve the delicate ecosystems that we all call home. The public version, but I hope it helped really demonstrate the point that I was trying to make. And with the generous support of Dolphin Quest, we really were able to fully launch this program this year. We're now working in multiple countries with multiple species of concern from South America to Africa and Asia. And so one of the most pressing issues I'll just leave with you to contemplate is one that's unfolding today in the Amazon. Last month, Dr. Forrest Gomez, who's pictured here in the navy blue rash guard, our Operation Grace program director spent time in Tefe, Brazil to bring her veterinary expertise to health assessments of these Amazon river dolphins at the request of the species expert. Dr. Mariam Marmantel. Weeks later, dolphins began dying at unprecedented numbers due to an extreme drought and high water temperatures that reached 102 degrees Fahrenheit. Over 175 Amazon river dolphins and 32 Takuchis have died so far. And this is about 10%, maybe up to 20% of the population of the river dolphins. So Dr. Marmantel and her team are working around the clock to better understand the cause, but they do believe it to be climate change and heat related. And Dr. Gomez just arrived yesterday to help determine how to best save and protect the animals that are still trapped in the warm part of the Amazon river and will be moving. So in addition to the rescue effort, there are research questions and conservation questions that are being addressed as they need crops to see the bodies of the animals that did not survive. So I tried to end on an inspiring and lightning note, but then I just took it right back to reality. So I'll just end with some reflections for all of you as you consider and during your transition from Ilar to Baskar. Is that how you're referring to it? Yes. And as you're expanding your mission into these different emerging areas of animal health, conservation and science, and I specifically want to address the third aim that you mentioned this morning that really resonated with me was that your strengthening research that benefits human, animal, environmental and planetary health is a bold, big aim, and I applaud you for that. So first, I was thrilled to see marine mammals included on your agenda. Marine mammals and human care can help scientists and vets develop these essential techniques and create relevant comparisons for studying and conserving wild animal populations and crisis all over the world. Wild marine mammals can also help us answer questions in animal health, science, conservation and research, particularly given their role as top predators and rapidly evolving ecosystems under pressure. Conservation scientists should really consider the human dimension and how these animal crises are intimately connected to the humans that live side by side with them. The livelihoods and the human health issues are often intertwined. And finally, marine mammal health science really must be prioritized for funding as opportunities for funding are extremely limited, despite the unique relevance of marine mammals to ecosystem, environmental and human health. And I might add planetary health as well. So that's it. I really do appreciate being here. Thank you so much for the time. And I'm not sure if we have time for questions, but I'm happy to take any now or at some other time. Thank you. Thank you. That was extraordinary. And I am certain there are many questions, but I think what we're going to do just in the interest of time is so save your questions. And we're going to circle back. So I think we'll go on to our next speaker. So Tracy Goldstein. Sorry. Next. Ah, she's online. Of course. All right. So we are going to. So. Oh, I thought you said something. Okay. Okay. Um, Dr. Goldstein is a director of the One Health Institute and professor in the Department of Microbiology, immunology and pathology at Colorado State University. Prior to joining CSU she was the division chief of the emerging threats division Bureau for global health at USAID. Since 2020, where she led the global health security program, working with partner countries and the global community to build better preparedness for future emerging infectious disease threats. In her previous position, she was a professor in the Department of Pathology, immunology and microbiology and associate director of the One Health Institute at the University of California, Davis. At UC Davis, she managed a research program to understand the health of people wildlife and the environment, as well as marine mammal virology diagnostic service and served as the co principal investigator for the 10 year global predict project. She is the chair of NOAA Fisheries Working Group on marine mammal, unusual mortality events. And she continues to study health and diseases in marine mammal and other wildlife populations in order to understand their health and the risk of spillover to people. And she'll speak to us today on one health surveillance to detect and understand zoonotic risk in wildlife, domestic animals and people. Welcome. Thank you so much. It's so great to be there. Well, unfortunately, not great to be there not to be in person. I'm really sorry to not be here, but I'm really excited to be able to be talking to this group today. And I hope I can follow on from the amazing speakers already. I will touch on some some pieces that both Raina and Cynthia have raised and then hopefully expand on some of that. But really what I wanted to focus on today is, you know, one health surveillance in particular bringing in wildlife into that surveillance system, and how we can pair that surveillance with follow up work so that we can inform on risk both to animals and to people. See if these are working today. Nope. See if I can advance the slide. So as you are all aware, we're recovering currently from the worst pandemic in history. I think the world is now very aware of how a pathogen from animals can change all parts of our lives from our health to livelihoods to global economies. But really the question is how did we get here? And how are we going to prevent being in the situation again? So I use this image that many of you may have seen before that is talking about sort of the unprecedented global change that is affecting all parts of the ecosystem. Things like land, sea use change, direct exploitation of species and environment, of course, climate climate change, pollution, other invasive species. And all of this is really leading to increased outbreaks, both in severity and also in frequency, as well as changes in how humans and animals interact and how they are distributed. When we think about in particular emerging infectious diseases, many of us are aware that the majority of these are of animal origin, meaning zoonotic. And 75% of these emerging zoonoses actually originated in animals. Many of the pathogens that have already been spoken about today from SARS to NEPA to Ebola and HIV all originated in animals. But really the key thing here are these large global changes that are affecting that, but it's really human activities that are really changing that at the interface. And there's been a number of papers recently that have come out talking about the risks of animals, you know, in sort of all sorts of different environments. But I think the key piece here is really to be thinking about how human behavior is really driving this change, whether it's intensification of farming, deforestation, land use change, increasing of transportation, both at landed sea. These are all human behaviors. And in order to really address the risk of infectious diseases, we really need to be thinking about how do we understand or better understand human behavior, how contact is occurring, how we're changing our behaviors and working with those sociologists to figure out how we can incorporate behavior change in order to be successful with mitigation. Many of you probably have seen a version of this before and Raina also sort of linked to this. These viruses are often circulating in wild animals. They don't always make these animals ill. Sometimes they do, but they often don't. And then you may see spillover from wild animals directly into livestock. We see this with avian influenza moving from wild birds into poultry. And then they may amplify in poultry and then of course cause the large outbreaks that we're currently addressing almost globally right now. But other times they may be able to spill directly over from wildlife into people. And this is an example of that, of course, is Ebola, sometimes Nipah virus. And as I said, HIV and others. And of course, SARS-CoV-2 is also one of those on the list. So when we're trying to think about how do we address these large global problems, we really need to be thinking about incorporating the One Health approach. And what does that mean? That means understanding the connection between the health of the environment, animals and people and how those linked and needing to really bring together a multi-sectoral approach that addresses these issues at local, national, regional and then global issues and global levels. So incorporating not just people from one sector, but making sure that we're bringing in the veterinarians, sociologists, virologists, et cetera, to be able to address these really large problems that are affecting how it's affecting our health. So as I go through, I'm going to talk about three different sort of stories showing how we can take surveillance from wildlife and then pair that with follow-up studies to see what that can help us to inform on and how they can inform either mitigation or future monitoring. One thing that as I go through, I'll talk about some challenges and opportunities related to this type of work. So first, as I mentioned, majority of these viruses are coming from wildlife, yet many of our surveillance systems are focused on either looking for specific pathogens in human or specific pathogens in livestock, often for economic purposes, but really there's no overlap or linking between these. So incorporating where we can concurrent sampling of wildlife, livestock and people to understand what pathogens are circulating in these different populations and what might be overlapping, as well as when we need a triangulation in particular when there's outbreaks of disease to try to understand what was present in animals either just prior to that or earlier and then what might be circulating in people. Often trying to do these one health studies can be more complicated, obviously it requires more coordination among sectors, bringing in the biologists, the veterinarians, the medical personnel, but really what this allows is for sharing across sectors, whether it's at the public and veterinary health lab level all the way up to the government levels, which is really clearly needed in order to be able to address these problems. As we see pathogens moving from one sort of sector across into another. And then critical to all of this is really trying to understand those behavioral and cultural practices that are promoting an increasing risk. As I said, it's human behavior that's changing and bringing people and animals in contact in more places and in more risky ways. And we're often seeing this high risk occurring at these buffers where there's that large change such as deforestation bringing wild populations in closer contact with domestic and or human populations that's really driving that risk. And so when we thinking about a one health approach, we really need to be figuring out how can we key into that social side of things, bring in the social scientists and those professionals to be able to help us to first appropriately identify the cultural practices that are occurring and then to find ways culturally to be able to address these to reduce contact with animals in a safe way and reduce risk. So often when you're trying to identify pathogens across different species and across different sample sites, we need to really think about how do we cost a wide net. So starting with detection, often methods such as broad family PCR are used. So for example, you can use a coronavirus assay that might be able to detect SARS-CoV-2, but also other coronaviruses, and then also metagenomics. But this is certainly an area where there are a number of challenges and I feel that much more innovation is needed for us to figure out how do we expand our toolkit in order to be able to better detect both known and new threats. Just doing the surveillance and detecting these potential pathogens is not enough. We need to then take it to the next step to be able to sequence the genome so we can better understand and classify what these potential risks may be. And then really link that with other processes, whether it's epidemiologic studies, ecologic studies or experimental work in order to better understand and assess the risk. So this is a slightly different way of showing the information that Raina was sort of referring to where you sort of look at this issue at different scales. So often you can screen for viruses on a global scale that might tell us a little bit about ecological or evolutionary drivers. And then we need to drop down at different scales looking at individual viruses or hosts to try to understand the potential risk and then put that all together so that we can start to obtain a picture of what might be needed. And again, I want to highlight another challenge right now. And this is often the case after a large pandemic such as we went through where while we're talking about implementing a one health approach and this is really being spoken at it at such high levels all the way from the WHO through the Biden Harris administration and reflected in a number of documents. It's important for us as the scientific community to show how we would implement this work, the benefits of that work, and then also to make sure that that resource are going towards that sort of pre emergent phase. We have a tendency to invest more on public health, which is important, but if we don't assess what's happening prior to spillover, we will never really be able to truly mitigate what occurs once spillover occurs and to be able to prevent that spread. So I'm going to jump into the three different examples that I was going to show you to sort of walk you through how we've done some of this work. Obviously, coronaviruses don't need much of an introduction any longer. I think we're all, you know, quite familiar with these sadly after the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic. But some of the information that people don't necessarily recognize is prior to recognizing SARS-1, 2, and then MERS, coronaviruses have been circulating in people for many, many years. And most of them have caused mild diseases usually linked to respiratory illness and sort of gets caught in with that sort of seasonal sort of flu, cold type complex. And we often aren't doing surveillance to really understand what is circulating when. But really what most people don't really recognize is that the majority of these viruses actually have their origins in animals and many of them in particular in bats. And so this really made us want to think about, you know, what is it about bats and this association with coronaviruses. There have been a number of non-human coronaviruses that have been severe pathogens in animals, including porcine epidemic, diarrhea virus, and then of course, FIP in cats. So there's a lot of gaps in understanding of coronaviruses, but clearly this is a family of zoonotic concern. We've seen that they can be quite efficient in many different species and understanding more about them is definitely critical. So as a part of the work that we were doing funded by USAID, we wanted to understand what was the distribution and the diversity of coronaviruses among different species. And we were able to do this work over 30 countries and focusing particularly on bats, non-human primates, rodent screws. There were some other wildlife and then humans and when possible domestic animals. And what you can see very clearly is despite the number of animals that were tested, by far the largest majority of coronaviruses were in bats. And in fact, by the end of this study, we'd actually detected almost 200 distinct different coronaviruses in bats species. So by far why large more numbers in F species? Additionally, we found that these viruses were across the entire coronavirus family, even in groups that we had previously thought were linked with birds or rodents. And so this sort of indicated that perhaps bats really are the reservoir host across the board for coronaviruses. Now, if we were talking about hunter viruses in this scenario, we would be talking about rodents and screws. And so it's important to recognize that different taxa seem to be more likely to be host reservoirs for different types of viral families. The next thing we wanted to do was try to take a look at where were the bats species that we tested around the world in terms of distribution. And then where did we find these viruses? And this would be important to inform on where to put future efforts for surveillance. So again, what you're looking at here is species richness. So when you see red, it means that we were finding more bat species or we sampled more bat species. And when you see green, either fewer species or information is not well known in that area. So certainly what we found where there were hotspots of areas around the world where there was a high diversity of bats. And interestingly in those places, we also found a very high diversity of viruses. So the more bats, the more types of coronaviruses were found. In terms of the epidemiologics side of things, many of these positives were found in feces. So that's important when you're thinking about what type of samples you might want to test in order to broadly detect viruses. And then we also found, as Reina pointed out, a high prevalence in younger animals. So that is also important to think about how we would target our work. Reina sort of mentioned this as well. First, a couple of things that came out of the study. We know that these coronaviruses or the ability to detect them is quite rare. So we found that if we were not able to sample more than 200 animals, we generally didn't detect coronaviruses. So again, important to think about in terms of resources. But within a species, we found anywhere between one and seven different coronaviruses. So again, species differed in terms of the number and the types of coronaviruses that we found. But if we really extrapolate this out into the number of species that we know occur globally, this lets us know that there are about more than 3,000 coronaviruses still to be discovered in bats. And so really to think about if we want to understand risk from the past, we really need to be thinking about how do we invest in surveillance in the future to be able to protect both animal conserved species as well as human health. So building on that a little bit, we also found that there was an association of certain viruses with certain hosts. So I'm going to focus on the SARS-CoV-2 or the Sobeca virus group, because of course that's of a lot of interest. But what we found was the SARS related beta coronaviruses were generally found in insectivorous bats. So these are right allofid and hippociderate family bats. And so this is really important to think about where we want to focus our future efforts if we really want to understand what is the distribution of SARS-related coronaviruses in bats and where might we look for them. So similar to the previous slide, we took a similar approach where we took the hippociderate and run alofid bats globally and mapped them out by distribution to see where there was overlap of where these bats species were. And also overlap that with where we found the SARS-2B coronaviruses. So the first thing you can see is there's a hotspot in Southeast Asia where we found both a high diversity of these bats species, as well as a large number of positive bats for these coronaviruses. But then also if you take a look in Africa, you see pockets in West Africa, Central Africa, and also Southern Africa. And in fact, we did find coronaviruses, 2B coronaviruses in bats in Rwanda, Uganda, and also in Tanzania. So I wanted to highlight a couple of things with this. First, it's important to recognize that we don't want to only look at where viruses have come from in the past. Of course, we see that huge red hotspot in Southeast Asia, and we know that to be the case as we've seen SARS-1 and 2 emerge from that region of the world previously. But the fact that we see hotspots in places like Africa makes us really think about how do we look at risk in the future? And how do we prepare governments and countries to be able to detect these risks before they're able to spill over? The other piece that I'll talk about before I move on to the next slide is, interestingly, many of the viruses that we found in places like Africa did not appear to, based on the genome sequence, use that human receptor that we all know now to be so important that allows these viruses to enter human cells. Whereas many of the sequences that we found in Southeast Asia did appear to have that ability to use the ACE2 receptor. So another really important piece of wildlife surveillance is to understand the diversity of these viruses and start to be able to dig into what is it that allows one thing to be able to use a human receptor and another not, and what are those underlying mechanisms, because that potentially can help us to understand how a non-pathogen could potentially evolve to become a pathogen. Finally, that work around sort of pinpointing where SARS-related coronaviruses may be found actually panned out sort of at the early parts of the pandemic, where many collaborators began to start to look in these areas of the world that appear to be higher risk for detection of those. And there have been a number of studies since that time that have published viruses in Cambodia, Laos, Thailand, Myanmar and other places. So really highlighting the fact there's a lot more for us to learn and surveillance to be done in order to understand what is circulating in these animals. I'm going to shift gears to another family of viruses, and this time talk a little bit about how we might want to link surveillance with some experimental studies to understand risk. It's been interesting listening to a lot of the conversation around the pandemic and why is it that we don't know the origin of the COVID-19 pandemic. And this is actually not unusual, unfortunately. We often don't have surveillance systems in place that are monitoring for these pathogens all along, and so recreating history after the fact is often quite difficult. And Ebola virus research is one of those key examples. So despite more than 40 years of research, we still don't actually know the reservoir for many of these Ebola viruses. We were starting to understand that past viruses are often linked with contact with primates and sometimes in bats, but we really don't have a lot of information. There is some evidence both by PCR and also by antibodies showing that bats likely maintain these viruses, but it's been difficult to really understand that. And so at the end of the West Africa outbreak, at the time of the largest Ebola virus outbreak, USAID had asked if we could try to figure out if we could understand what were the hosts of Ebola viruses and how were they circulating in animals. And so we did a large study looking at more than 20,000 animals across Sierra Leone, Guinea and Liberia. We looked at these animals across a geographic distribution from urban rural to forest areas. And then we wanted to look at potential reservoirs, so bats, rodents and primates, as well as potential spillover hosts. We didn't understand if there was the potential for this virus to be spilling back into domestic species and then being maintained. And then we also wanted to look at multiple sampling over time, both in the dry and in the wet season. So surprisingly, we actually found positive insectivorous bats in three different communities within Sierra Leone. When we did the sequencing, we found that this was indeed an Ebola virus, but it was not Ebola Zaire. It was a new Ebola virus that at the time we named Bomboli. And this was found in two species of insectivorous bats, and these bats were widespread across Sub-Saharan and Central Africa. And they were found in people's homes, so it was critical for us to understand if this virus had the potential to infect people. So this is where we pulled in a number of different experimental studies using synthetic systems to be able to compare Bomboli Ebola virus to Ebola Zaire and other Ebola viruses. The question was, where did it sit on the spectrum? We know that Sudan and Ebola Zaire are highly pathogenic, whereas Reston appears to be pathogenic in primates, but less pathogenic in people. So we used different synthetic systems to understand pieces of different genes to see if the virus could use the human receptor to enter cells. It was able to. If it had the ability to replicate in human cells and culture, again, it was able to, but not as efficiently as Ebola Zaire was in human cells. And then also to evaluate the ability to limit the immune system to be able to prevent infection. And this is something that Ebola Zaire is really good at. And again, Bomboli had all of these features, but not at that same level as Zaire. So this was critically important for us to be able to take this information and be able to use that in terms of working with the community, working with the government and being able to communicate. What we found as well as to prepare governments to be able to work with their laboratories and surveillance systems to be able to expand different Ebola viruses in their repertoire. Additionally, because we found that these species were widespread, this sparked additional studies across Africa and in fact found this virus in bats, for example, in Kenya. So again, letting us know that these viruses are more widely distributed than we thought previously and that we really need to be thinking about risk in terms of where do animals live and where are they distributed rather than just thinking about it from the past. Finally, as a part of this work, we also in coordination with the US CDC detected Marlboro virus in bats in Sierra Leone. This was the first time that we actually found a hemorrhagic virus in a bat prior to an outbreak in the region. This was the furthest west that Marlboro virus had ever been found. And if you take a look at the map on the right, it shouldn't be surprising in orange shows the distribution of this bat species. And we see that while it is found in pockets along the west coast of Africa and Central and then Southern Africa, it also is found in this pocket in West Africa. Rosetta's Egypticus is known to be the host of Marlboro virus. And so this was critically important to make sure that we could work with labs to have the ability to test for the virus, as well as clinical doctors to recognize that when they see hemorrhagic disease to be thinking more broadly than Ebola's a year or less a fever in those in those regions. And that actually really paid off fast forward to 2021, 22 and 23. We've seen Marlboro outbreaks now in Ghana, Guinea, equatorial Guinea, and also in Tanzania. And fortunately, because of some previous work, systems were in place to be able to test quickly and respond quickly in those outbreaks and limiting limiting limiting them. And then the final example that I'm going to use is kind of bringing it back to climate change and back here to the US. I mentioned I've been doing some work with remammals and looked up in Alaska. I think climate change is something that we're seeing affecting the world globally, but when you live in in Alaska, it's sort of prescient every day. And it's very clear how the effects of what's happening in the environment is affecting the remammal species, which is also, of course, affecting human livelihoods. So we've seen some of the warmest temperatures ever in the last few years up in the Arctic. And in the winter, often we're finding years where the ice is no longer forming across in that ice bridge between Alaska and Russia. And this is really important for some of the work I'm about to show you. And we're also seeing entire villages having to be relocated as they're falling into the sea due to loss of sea ice. So as a result, and a part of this, NOAA began to do some work. So this is the Polar Ecosystems Program to understand how Arctic species, Arctic seals in particular, were adapting to low ice. And so they were capturing animals, putting satellite tags on them and trying to understand how they were using the habitat. As a part of this work, we were sampling for a number of different pathogens, bacterial and viral pathogens known to cause disease and outbreaks in remammals. And very surprisingly, we found a virus called fociandostempovirus that causes outbreaks and harvest seals in Europe. We went back in time and were able to pinpoint when the virus was first detected, but using archive samples in a number of species in the area. And we're able to then link that with animal movement, looking at where animals were moving and looking at sea ice. So openings in sea ice over the years. So what we found was when there was the first outbreak, large outbreak in 2002 in Europe, that was the first year that openings in ice along the Alaskan and Canadian coast were open. And this allowed animals to move from the Atlantic into the Pacific, bringing the virus with them. Well, so if you begin to wrap it up. Yep. And so this is my last slide. So really, I just wanted to talk. So I just wanted to end by saying, there's a sort of a number of areas here where public health and science sort of intersect. And I think this is an area that will be pretty important for us to think about how to be partner on this. This information that we're finding is important to get out into the communities and work with the host country governments. And this puts us at this weird intersection in terms of how do we share those that information without jeopardizing also engaging with the scientific community. And so that's just the last challenge I wanted to put out there. Thank you. I apologize. I went a little long, but thank you very much and I appreciate the time. Thank you. It was it was wonderful and we'll have a chance for some questions at the end. All right, let's move. There we go. There's Steve. In person. All right, so we are next going to hear from Dr. Steve Asofsky, and he's going to be speaking on his title of his talk is beyond fences, policy options for wildlife, livelihoods and trans boundary animal disease management in southern Africa. Stephen Asofsky is a veterinarian who works on developing and helping to apply science based landscape scale approaches to conservation, particularly in terms of policy guidance to address challenges at the interface of wildlife agriculture and other types of land use and people. He is the Jay Hyman Professor of Wildlife Health and Health Policy at Cornell University's College of Veterinary Medicine, and he's one of the pioneers of the One Health Movement he's been involved in many of the big initiatives related to One Health. They are in the package so I'm just going to say them that Manhattan principles of one World One Health ahead and a number of others so I'm going to leave those and just share the rest of this. He has brought his practical expertise, which includes some both health and environmental conservation perspectives to begin to shape interdisciplinary approach to the field of planetary health and Professor Asofsky previously held senior positions at the World Wildlife Fund and at the at the Wildlife Conservation Society WCS, as well as the government at as with the government of Botswana. He was also honored to serve as it as an American Association for the advancement of science and diplomacy fellow, and as a biodiversity program specialist at the US agency for international development. He is now shepherding Cornell University's new Cornell Wildlife Health Center. Thank you. Well, thank you so much for allowing me to share some work with you here today. Again, my talk is called beyond fences policy options for wildlife, livelihoods and trans boundary animal disease management in southern Africa all work carried out under the ahead program which stands for animal and human health for the environment development, which is under our Cornell Wildlife Health Center umbrella. So this is a zebra dead along a foot and mouth disease control fence in Botswana. And this was something I would intermittently see when I first got to Botswana in the early 1990s to serve as the government's first wildlife veterinary officer for the Botswana Department of Wildlife and National Parks. But the story I need to share with you here today goes back to the late 1950s, where in all the countries we're going to talk about where colonies are protectorates. So Botswana was the British protectorate of Bacowana. Zimbabwe was British Southern Rhodesia Namibia was German Southwest Africa and then under South African auspices. And in the late 1950s, if the colonial powers were obviously looking for economic traction, this is before diamonds were discovered in this part of the world. And if you're a colonialist, that's what you do. And what they decided they would try was to export beef from Southern Africa back to your back to the motherland. But even in the late 1950s, they were aware that the foot and mouth disease family viruses were resident in the region in the African buffalo. The African buffalo is the only wild species we know of. There's a natural reservoir of these viruses. They don't get sick from them, but they do carry them. So what largely the British and the Germans decided to do in order to export this beef was to start to build fences to keep buffalo and other wildlife over here and livestock over here. And over the ensuing decades, thousands and thousands of kilometers of these fences have been built. Many of them funded externally, not just by the British and the Germans, but by the EU more broadly, the World Bank. And I think it's safe to say in retrospect, what we have can be described as a slow motion environmental trend. Because hundreds of thousands, if not millions of wild animals like the zebra have died along these fences because these animals need to migrate. I want you to keep this in mind, migration is the lifeblood of the conservation of these species. We need to migrate to access grazing at different times of year. Fresh water, min over sources, breeding opportunities to maintain long term genetic viability. So again, this was a this was a monosexual decision focused on beef agriculture. Wildlife was not considered a particularly valuable resource. So I just want to give you a sense of what these fences look like. The line map is just the major fences in this part of the world. Imagine if you're a wildebeest, you're not going to be able to go across this region. The animals don't care about national boundaries. They historically had these long migratory roots. The color image is an aerial photo. You can see the maintenance roads along a double corded fence that goes on and on and on into the horizon. This is a well maintained double corded fence and usually 10 to 12 feet high. And if they are well maintained, they do what they were intended to do, which is to stop the movements of animals. So when I talk to our students, I kind of explain that history is sort of the environmental factors. But I want to spend the rest of our time together really talking about good news. And today, today, nature-based tourism, nature-based related activities contribute more to the GDPs, the gross domestic product of the Southern African development community, the Southern African region, than livestock agriculture, forestry and fisheries combined. That's a dramatic change in the macroeconomic picture and one that has not been lost upon the heads of states in these countries. So there's been an experiment underway for now about 20 years where more than a dozen peace parks or trans-frontier conservation areas on this slide, you'll hear me say TFCA, trans-frontier conservation areas are being created. And I wanted to find those for you. A peace park or a TFCA, trans-frontier conservation areas when two or more countries essentially agree to rezone, if you will, so that, say, wildlife in a national park in country A can get back and forth to a game reserve in country B. It's a rezoning to facilitate restoration of these critical wildlife movements. And as I said, there are more than a dozen of these now. And if you add up all those blotches on that I put on the map there, it's the surface area adds up to the same as if you had the state of Texas, the state of California and the state of New York. This is, I believe, the largest experiment in terrestrial conservation in the world, and very few people are even aware that it's underway. And I want to be clear, the motivate here is largely economic and that's fine. If you think about global beef flows, Africa contributes probably less than 1% of all internationally traded beef, but Africa owns nature-based tourism. It's their global competitive advantage. And so in many ways the peace parks movement is about making wildlife two things, economically rational and socio-cultural acceptable. We can do those two things and conservation becomes an ongoing land use of preference. So I want to now quickly zone in on the Kavango-Zambiazian transfer into your conservation. It's that amoeba-looking thing down there. It is superimposed there, you can see on the northeast United States, it is the biggest transfer to your conservation area in the terrestrial, in the world. And if you think about what it really is, it is not a giant natural park. None of these transfer to your conservation areas are parks for sale. They're multi-use areas. There's agriculture, there are people, there are railways, there's mining. At the core is this attempt to restore habitat so that wildlife can migrate, even though there are other obstacles. So I want to tell you a little bit more about the Kavango-Zambiazia, because it is the focus of our work right now. It was created in 2011 at a Heads of State Treaty level, and Golovac's one and Amoeba-Zambiazian-Zambiazian came together to create this entity. It's more than 500,000 square kilometers. It's home to about two and a half million people, which is fairly sparsely populated, which works in its favor, and their livestock. One of the really important things about Taza, I will call it Taza for short, it is home to the majority of what's left of Africa's elephants. Decades and decades ago, we had millions of elephants in Africa. We're down, unfortunately, to less than 500,000, in all likelihood, 228,000 of them. The survey just came out a few months ago that both of those elephants are in these five countries. There are significant pressures on this landscape related to human settlement, from poaching, drought, fire, but veterinary offenses are at the core of the land use conundrum. And I want to pause for a moment and just recognize that we as a species are very good at seeing snapshots, but we're not very good at seeing these. What I mean by that is if you go on safari today to Botswana, it's spectacular. You will see spectacular lava. But if you saw those same landscapes in the 1950s, they were far, far more than a lot like across this habitat. All the major wildlife species have declined because of these threats, including fragment-issued habitat, the building of fences. The other thing I should mention, we've heard a lot about climate change today. If you think about the climate models and what they say about Southern Africa, it all points to a ongoing, drying trend. And the only way a wildlife, or in fact, astralists and their cattle to be able to adapt to climate change is to be able to move north-south with that. But the fences even preclude the only major adaptive strategy available for wildlife and people. And the premise of the work we're doing is that the way we've chosen to manage disease in quite a quick amount with geographic patterns threatens the entire vision for a successful transformative conservation area. I also want to be clear that cattle are part and parcel of the cultures of these countries. Botswana has had cattle since 600 AD. This isn't about pinning one sector against another. It's not either or. It's about finding a resilient homage. We learned very harshly during COVID when tourists were completely dried up. It was a good thing people still had their livestock. Similarly, when they have droughts, livestock often get hit hard first, but tourism can go on for quite a while, even in the face of the drought. So we want resilience. We want to find a way to harmonize these sectors. So I just want to recap some of the things that I've explained. Transforming your conservation, this whole movement requires a free movement of wildlife over these large geographic areas. And yet, the historically accepted approaches to the management of transboundary animal diseases requires the prevention improvement of animals. So the vision for peace parks and a geographic or fence-based management of animal diseases are fundamentally incompatible. And sustainable livelihoods depend on a new approach. If you look at what's happened with foot and mouth disease in the region, I've got three countries here, Botswana, Namibia, and South Africa. And each of the three bars are a decade of the incidence of foot and mouth disease outbreaks. And you can see up until the 80s and 90s, we had a lot of foot and mouth, and then vaccines were introduced locally. And we had a precipitous drop in the incidence of foot and mouth disease outbreaks. That was great. It was great for livestock agriculture. But you can see it didn't take too long for the outbreaks to be rebounding. And that's happened for a few reasons. First of all, that fencing infrastructure that I mentioned to you, it's really expensive to maintain in a place where elephants constantly break it. And a lot of those external subsidies that I mentioned have melted away. We also have the same problems managing foot and mouth that we've seen with coronavirus with COVID, where vaccines have to keep up with the circulating strains. And that's a challenge. And sometimes there might be mismatches between the vaccine strain for livestock and what's circulating. And even getting enough vaccines into enough cattle to make an epidemiological difference becomes a challenge as more and more governments are strapped in terms of their veterinary services. So we've had more than 30 outbreaks in this decade. I need to update that number. And what we really have now is a crisis. You can see foot and mouth outbreaks are constant in the region. But for what we're trying to do, this crisis does represent an opportunity. So this is that same amoeba I was showing you before. You can see the green outline is the outline of the Kaza Transfrontier Conservation Area. What I want you to notice here, does my pointer show up on there? Yeah, it does. All these six circles with lines in them, those are the six most important corridors for wildlife to be able to migrate. This has been found through radio telemetry work, long-term wildlife observations, historical records. We know where the wildlife need to be able to move. And all six of those are either currently compromised or will likely be compromised by things like veterinary fencing. So I want to, we're going to zoom in here. We're going to see the Okavango here, and we're going to zoom in. And in this map, we've zoomed in. Here is the Okavango River. Here's the Okavango Delta, many of you have heard of it. In this map, sorry, the fences are yellow and black. There's foot and mouth disease fences. There's also fences for what's called bovine lung disease. And I want you to focus on this pocket here. I think by nobody's design, the fencing system created a giant pocket. And elephants live in this pocket. There are about 18,000 elephants and about 15,000 people. And along the river, there are a lot of human habitations where the elephants don't really want to get into trouble. So what we've got is a giant cage. And these elephant population is growing at at least 5% a year. This is the hotbed of human-elephant conflict in Kaza. Elephants raid crops, people get killed. This is a pressure cooker. And it was created inadvertently by a fencing policy that didn't take the ecosystem into account. So now we've got to figure out what to do about this. I want to put or find a point on it. This is some fascinating data from Robin Naidu and team from Frontiers and Conservation Science. This is based on years and years of radio telemetry. The top map, you can see this black area. That's that same pocket. Those are dots representing satellite collar readings from female elephants that were collared in Botswana. And over the years, you can see they never left that box. The red in that map are female elephants collared in Namibia. And they're also bunched up along the other fences that I showed you. The female elephants are not able to get through these barriers. I'm going to tell you why. But interestingly, this map down the bottom is a little bit different. Male elephants, the male elephants collared in both countries, it's a little bit more of a diffuse picture because the bull elephants don't stay with the herds. They will break through fences and move around a bit more. But the herds, the females don't move because even when the fences are badly damaged, there's a cable just about this high, just that calf elephant calf height. And if the elephant calves can't cross it, herds won't cross. So those elephants are boxed in. This is a fairly decrepit fence. And that's I'm holding the cable just to show you that this one piece of infrastructure has this huge impact. This is data shared by the governor of Botswana, the governor of Namibia, the NGO Eco Exist, and the World Wildlife Fund. And this is real, again, radio telemetry data. And I want you to focus in that same box, those gray elephants, those are females bouncing around like ping pong balls hitting that fence. The red on the Namibian side, same thing. Female elephants, largely bouncing along another fence. They just can't get through. And it's not just elephants. Elephants are a very visual species for us to use, but we've documented a whole range of species with the same problem. So I'm trying to make it clear that in this part of what livestock agriculture and wildlife conservation are both absolutely vital for economic development, for resilience, for equity. And I mentioned that people need their livestock, but that nature-based tourism is crucial to economic growth. And what we've seen over the years is that the current attempts to control foot-and-mouth geographically, meaning with fences, is now limiting livelihood opportunities and it's compromising the whole system. And we have this intensifying conflict between these two sectors. The livestock sector blames wildlife for the presence of this foot-and-mouth disease virus, and the wildlife sector blames livestock for the fences. So we need some solutions. And that's what we've been working on for a number of years. And whatever we come up with has to do fundamentally three things. It has to help Southern Africa's pastoralists and farmers. The solution can no longer threaten the future of free-ranging wildlife. And we've got to be able to provide confidence to any countries that do want to buy beef from this part of the world that they're going to be able to import a product that's safe. Remember the whole European model here, they didn't want to accidentally have foot-and-mouth get into their cattle and then import it to Europe, because that's a disaster for your livestock. It also shuts down your international trade overnight. So the whole world is afraid of this virus. So we've got to make sure whatever we do is safe. So if we can add an extra hour, I have a whole lecture on the solution that I'm going to summarize in one slide. The solution is remarkably simple. There was existing science to show that if you want to make a high-quality steak, your cattle are going to be vaccinated. You're going to quarantine them. But when you slaughter them, if you hang the beef about two degrees Celsius for 24 hours, so the pH drops below six, then you de-bone it and you take out the lymph nodes, that beef is going to be safe in terms of FMD. FMD, if that cow had the virus in its system, that virus would not be present in the end product. That value chain-based approach, we didn't invent it. But what we did is work with our colleagues in SATIC and the African Union to convince the World Organization for Animal Health, OIE, now OWA, that this bio-safety-based approach, this value chain-based approach, should be considered equivalent to fences. It took about 10 years to using science-based advocacy to convince OIE to change the rules. But in 2015, all the world's chief veterinary officers voted on changing what's called the Terrestrial Animal Health Code. These rules are what the World Trade Organization relies on for countries, and all the world's countries are members of the OIE. It's older than the UN. These rules are what allow for the safe trade of animals and animal products around the world. So in 2015, this approach where we looked at how beef was produced was accepted globally. And that was a huge transformation in thinking. And that meant that the poorest farmers living in northern Botswana closest to Buffalo for the first time in 70 years, that's multiple generations, and that's a huge difference in the number of farmers and farmers living in the northern Botswana markets for their beef. So the science is there, the policies have been changed, and now we're working to implement this in partnership with the countries that want to pursue it. And one of the things we did with the SATIC, we wrote the guide on how to do this. It's very simple. This is not a complicated exercise, but how to process that beef from farm to fork to make it safe. It's really low-tech, the Southern African Development Community is essentially, it's like the EU of Europe. It's the official body that governs the countries on these things, from Tanzania to all the way to South Africa as a multilateral organization. They've now adopted these guidelines for what we've called commodity-based trade of beef, because we're focusing on the commodity, not whether the cow happened to be living near a species like an African buffalo. Now that those guidelines have been accepted, we're working with individual countries. For example, from Botswana where they asked us to do what's called the gap analysis. They said, look, let's look at our value chain, again, from farm to fork. What are we doing well? What can we do better? Looking at everything from vaccines to quarantine to slaughter facilities to how the animals are herded to keep them away from wildlife, all the risk mitigation that's needed. And the government Botswana has now been using this gap analysis, again, to implement this process so that the poorest of poor farmers first time in generations can trade their beef. This enabling environment that this partnership has created gave the partner countries the confidence to work with us on what was really a thorny question. Remember, I told you we knew where the wildlife migrations were most damaged by fences? Well, this was an analysis we did during the pandemic that really put a fine point on this. We went fence by fence. We did aerial surveys and ground surveys and looked at tracks, spore surveys, historical data, radio telemetry, and we showed exactly which fences are damaging which species most significantly. When I first started in Botswana in the early 1990s, that was not a question you were even allowed to ask. But because we've been working to solve these problems, there's now a willingness to revisit a paradigm that needs some rethinking. So I want to share with you the very basic results here. This is that same amoeba map, but I've inserted Botswana's map with the fences shown. The red fences in this map are fences that are going to stay pretty much regardless. They're important. They need to be there for managing the beef sector to allow the ongoing exports of beef, but the two different shades of blue are the fences that we found are most damaging to wildlife movements. The dark blue fences, on one side or the other, there's significant livestock populations, so some more work would need to be done to even talk about whether they could be removed. But the light blue fences, pretty much cover almost all of those six key pinch points that I described to you. And these are the light blue areas that are most damaging to wildlife. And with the advent of new approaches to herd management and commodity-based trade of beef, this way to be able to sell your beef without requiring fences, that's the key. The OIE says you don't need fences if you do this right. The governments that we're working with in CASA have now given us the green light to answer the question, whether these fences were no longer there. Some of these fences were put up decades ago. The epidemiological situation in many cases may have changed, and we have this new tool, this commodity-based trade of beef. So we are now finishing up an analysis basically asking a scenarios-based question if this 50 kilometers of offense wasn't here, would it cause more risk to your livestock or not? If not, would you consider realigning it to restore the migrations that are the lifeblood of the biodiversity of the region? So I was just last month at the... around the UN General Assembly meetings talking about this with President Massisi of Botswana and Minister of Environment Karang. This is a really important discussion and Botswana is a small country. We've been working directly with their version of USDA Veterinary Services with their departments of Veterinary Services in Botswana and Namibia, that we had support at the highest levels of government. And frankly, the issue of that human-elephant conflict, that pressure cooker that I mentioned she was very much on the President's mind. So I'm cautiously optimistic that we're going to be able to continue to navigate this defined a win-win solution. I'm off to the region again in two weeks where we're presenting the epidemiological analysis that I've described to you. We're going to go fence by fence and offer up using data that we have provided. Say, look, this fence, you're right, it needs to stay, because if you take it down you're going to get more foot in mouth and more lung disease and livestock. But this fence, if you take it down we don't believe it's going to pose any increased risk for animal diseases. That's what we're going to be doing in November. All this work was done under the auspices again of our AHEAD program, Animal and Human Health for the Environment and Development. We're basically a facilitator. My role is to be a bio-diplomat person in good science, but to recognize that we can find harmonious ways to solve these sexual challenges. I've got 20 years of data and reports at Cornell-AHEAD.org and our broader program is well summarized at wildlife.cornell.edu and I think that's all I have. Thank you. Super fascinating. I know there are many questions but I think we're going to move on to our final speaker and then we'll have a little stretch and then we can dive in with our discussion. Our final speaker is Rowena Purcell Watson who is with the U.S. Department of State serving as the division chief for wildlife conservation and combating wildlife trafficking in the Bureau of Oceans and International Environmental and Scientific Affairs in the Office of Conservation and Water. Rowena regularly collaborates with U.S. interagency as well as other governments, NGOs in the private sector. She has deep expertise combating wildlife trafficking global as other such trafficking in timber, precious metals and gemstones and crimes associated with IOU fishing. In the realm of environment and health she engages in efforts to prevent future pandemics by decreasing risk from zoonotic disease emergence and spillover and promoting a one health approach focused on animal and human environmental elements. She also works on many other environmental challenges in the foreign policy arena including illegal deforestation, illegal mining, chemical pollution and air quality and ocean topics. Rowena has extensive diplomatic experience in multilateral negotiations serving in leadership and international relations and in the US. She has been working on various programs to address delegations to multiple forums and conventions. With a strong science background zoonotic diseases and bioterrorism she was a freelance consultant and an American Association for Advancement of Science Diplomacy Fellow for scientists in policymaking. She is currently on detail with the State Department's Office of Interruption and Human Rights Abuses and Protect Environmental Defenders. For talk this afternoon we will be entitled International Policy and US Leadership Examples of Foreign Policy Intersections and Impacts. Oh good. Okay. Hi everybody. So I do not have slides and I will probably be faster so we can make up a little bit of time. Thanks for reading my entire bio. Well what I want to kick off with is saying how I've been State Department in the Civil Service for 12 years and I think a lot of people have no idea how much all the things that we've talked about here today I've worked quite a bit with Steve on One Health in a number of different forums including last week at UNGA where we chatted with the Botswana officials and others together but all of these topics really come up quite a bit and so I'm really excited that this panel or this board, this National Academy of Sciences board is renaming itself to expand the aperture on what you're looking at and how you're looking at these issues because I can tell you that they really come up across the street at the main State Department building and since I work in the main policy office that deals with wildlife and animal anything we really get questions all over the place on all this stuff and it's a very good time to be talking about these topics because I think that there's a lot of high level interest from the White House across the interagency and expertise on things like we're recalibrating our relationship with nature, we're addressing the biodiversity crisis, we're addressing the climate crisis, we're dealing with a very, very new landscape for the One Health approach as Steve and Tracy are probably very well aware so I think in the wake of COVID pandemic there's a lot more interest in really drilling down into the zoonotic disease dimensions of pandemics because maybe HIV and Ebola and NEPA, all of those weren't enough, maybe COVID was enough with its wildlife origins to get people to really look at the One Health approach so these conversations are happening and what I think I would like to give to the panel is more of a question and as well as an emphasis is the US is really seen in a leadership space on all these topics on animal welfare, on laboratory care and use, on wildlife conservation we give tremendous resources and we have tremendous expertise, I think some of our panelists have already talked about how we help other countries, we come in we have projects so we give a lot of money and time and knowledge in these areas and I want to give a couple examples of where these things have come up even in the past year and there's been questions within the interagency and with partners there's been either confusion or questions and where things like especially animal welfare I think is really kind of a fuzzy space with a lot of vagueness that could use a little bit more transparency and guidance from a board like this so let me give those few examples and then I'll come back to a couple closing thoughts and maybe I'll, I'm a good transition person for our discussion okay so the One Health approach quadripartite that's been mentioned well not the quadripartite so much but the One Health has been talked about quite a bit today One Health's been around for a long time right but have we really seen as some of the things that we heard about today from a couple of our speakers there's still a lot of work to do on the sort of wildlife and animal and environment dimensions of One Health One Health's really been about human health and maybe it's been about food safety really that's what it's been historically I think so a few years ago my office started an interagency One Health group that was focused on the wildlife and environment dimensions of One Health and at first we got a lot of pushback from not pushback just maybe question skepticism from a lot of the other One Health groups across the government to say we already have a One Health group USAID has a huge One Health program we've got it covered and our response was well not really the wildlife and the environment pieces they really aren't being robustly addressed they aren't being robustly addressed at the WAWA they're not being addressed at the time it was the tripartite of the FAO WHO and what was then the OIE and so we started this group that's still running last monthly and Suzanne with the Smithsonian has been a really helpful part of that but pulling out of the woodwork so to speak in the USG all the people that were really looking at the interface about spillover about wildlife conservation biodiversity conservation wildlife diseases just for conservation endangered species wildlife trafficking confiscated we do with them so all these topics that are relevant for One Health and for science and conservation who was really looking at those and more importantly what kinds of policies do we really want to see from that so I think one of the most relevant conversations I'm hearing now about in this group as well as across the USG on the One Health is what are we doing with our surveillance at wildlife disease surveillance that we were talking about earlier where's that data going who are we asking to change policies are those policies going to be in in an agricultural setting are they going to be about what wildlife species are going to be legal to trade so where are those where's that data going for something like disease surveillance with animals in wildlife who's really looking at that so these are these are getting into not only just having these collaborative discussions but what what I'm seeing is a need for the scientific community and the scientists and conservationists like like this group to drill down into not only identifying the scientific problem but identifying the question and possible solutions and then feeding that to decision makers policy makers perhaps other countries and partners that's where we're really the US again can be a leader there and understanding those steps is is really something that that is a need so that's so that's one example is where the wildlife and the environment dimensions of One Health had had been neglected and there's some questions and solutions there for the US expertise to address another example is going back to the welfare piece in 2022 the UN environment assembly passed a resolution on animal welfare environment and sustainable development nexus I don't know if anybody's at all is familiar with that no one's familiar with the UNEA resolution so in my world the UNEA resolution so UNEA is the the UN environment body that deals with a lot of these questions about biodiversity environment conservation but this particular resolution to even address animal welfare and how does it intersect with the environment and sustainable development it was a very awkward negotiation and conversation so I think several African countries had wanted to put this resolution forward but the whole topic of animal welfare has been sort of dissociated from conservation right and so I think that there's there's a disconnect there generally about animal welfare anything but as we've seen today animal welfare is connected to health standards connected to trade connected to our edge in research and development etc so there it's part of what needs that so but again that resolution sort of clunking along into to do the study of how does animal welfare interface with environment and sustainable development goals but it's an example where I think the expertise exists and the US could be leader and asking the right questions bringing the right information and a very interesting example and example I want to say that animal welfare that's happened over the past year is a wildlife trafficking case that took years to put together I've been working on combating wildlife trafficking for years and years but usually anything with research animals is that hasn't really come up so I'd say that research animals and certainly not research primates those aren't the usual things that we see that are discussed for wildlife trafficking we're talking about penguin scales or ivory so we're talking and sometimes we're talking about maybe songbirds if we're dealing with a lot live animals but there's a whole gamut of things that are illegal illegally traded for wildlife but the research animals wasn't really something that anyone had gone near really studied there's a lot of money in research animals which I think most of us are aware of so there's a case that's an ongoing Department of Justice case right now where government officials in Cambodia were illegally sourcing non-human primates from the wild saying that they were captive bred because they couldn't breed the numbers fast enough or they had the opportunity to sell more and more because they were so the non-human primates the long-tail macaques were so in demand so they just started pulling them from the wild this was a problem it was against international law it was against all kinds of laws it's a zoonotic disease risk they're claiming some things laboratory bred when it's not so on and on lots of problems but basically because there was a some of the animal rights groups that were that cared about having no research primates or asking questions about it and there was not a lot of transparency with the pharmaceutical companies who were using non-human primates there got to be just this murky ground of no one wanted to share information and ask hard questions but what really had happened was and this is still somewhat of a gap the regulations for bringing animals in and for quarantining them really didn't take into account adequate trafficking concerns so there was a law of enforcement clash with some of the laboratory the regulations for bringing in an HP and I think that that's still an ongoing discussion that certain folks within the USG are going to be taking a harder look at so but my point was that the wildlife trafficking case and DOJ's case that should be everyone should want a legal supply chain right absolutely animal welfare concerns and non-transparency and gaps in policies this has made it actually more difficult to talk about so that's another thing that's just come up in this past year in my world on on combating wildlife trafficking and the US task force on wildlife trafficking that I'm sharing so those are ideas that there's a lot of things that this group could tackle and be a strong voice for US policy and US leadership I get I have so there was so many things that are coming up that people mentioned today earlier already you know there's IUCN there's CITES there's the convention on biological diversity there's the Pelley amendment there's the Antarctic Council there's the sustainable development goals sustainable agriculture interests so on and on where this this group is very relevant to foreign policy and these questions about animal care animal use animal welfare are are super important so I think I think that's about all that I wanted to cover and yes thanks so much for looping me in here I'm sure it was a little bit of a profile thank you and I think that's a perfect bridge to our discussion shall we jump into people need to take a little break we have another at 415 we're taking our official break so I think we can if it's okay people will just move right into it what incredible speakers and so much covered it's it's a little challenging to figure out how to structure this conversation I thought maybe we should just start by going back to our first speaker and just allowing if there are questions that people have directly to those speakers just have two or three questions and then at let's say maybe four o'clock or so we'll talk in general terms have some themes and that we can all of you can weigh in on so so with that I wonder if Dr. Hankinson I don't know Claire I wonder if we can just ask you to answer some questions and people may have been taking notes and if any if anybody wants to jump and that's fine I can I have a couple of thoughts but unless anybody else does rather okay well collect your thoughts and I was really interested in the transparency movement or initiative or can you give a little bit of background about a little bit of history and when did that start and what is the state of it now so it really came I have to credit the UK Wendy Jarrett who was working very closely on what was called the Concordant and it was an effort to provide information about research what was going on within the walls of research institutions to the public in an effort to dispel the mythology around it and dispel some of the negativity that was assumed to be part of it it was a really important effort because she had to get endorsement from multiple institutions and she did and I'm sorry I don't have a different talk somewhere I can give you the specifics later of how many institutions signed on to that Concordant and that was an agreement that they would talk about the work that they did and it became such an important positive outcome because they saw the number of requests for information diminish they saw more positive public support and it kind of met all of the goals that they had hoped which was if we talk about what we do more so then maybe there won't be so much resistance publicly because of a lack of knowledge and understanding and so from that now there have been multiple countries that have moved forward with their own agreement the U.S. group started pulling together I want to really credit Paula Clifford who's with AMP now because she pulled together a group I think it was the 2019 ALAS meeting to begin to talk about what it would look like if we had a U.S. agreement and it was a really interesting conversation around the table because a lot of people felt we weren't ready as a country for it and there's so many different sectors that work with research animals that wouldn't feel comfortable opening their doors so to speak so we made it we sort of pivoted a bit and said okay we're not going to do an agreement that everyone signs on but we're going to do an initiative and how would that look so the website now has it's taken several years to get there it's a grassroots organization people volunteer and we have had dozens and dozens of individuals in the research world join in because I think we want to see something change people need to feel like they can talk about the important work that they do and not be silenced by the fact that it's something that might be punished publicly and from that now has sprung a number of ongoing including the what if campaign that we really organically thought of after a session in February and decided we needed to continue to push out into social media realm what would it really look like if you weren't able to get your medicine tomorrow at CVS that you need in order to feel okay what would that look like and there's been a lot of resistance to I think using tactics that might be viewed as fear based however the algorithms that we all are so attuned to now in social media are exactly that to be a little more provocative and so the 50-50 split of public support to public lack of support and research we really need to tip the balance and to begin to do it more openly with some transparency that's the goal and it's going to take a while but we're making some inroads and we have a lot of internal support for that as well thank you and I quickly ask and make a thought from that last slide you showed medical advances that have been made or aided by research animals in addition to medical there were conservation advances species preserved and companion animals absolutely I think it would be very robust that's been sort of a slide that I've enjoyed adding to over the years as those seem to get the most public prominence particularly this year with the vaccine that seemed to hopefully ring true for a lot of people that had at least some direct access or interest in that specifically but yeah I think that list has could be developed in many different ways for the board for sure on this board we've had conversations as part of the de-centering of homo sapiens and this landscape of species of thinking of ways to thicken the eras that go from the biomedical insights to other species absolutely thank you alright let's go on so can I call you symphony Cynthia it's okay Cynthia alright so your phenomenal talk we'll want to jump in and I think people have to go back a little bit and so you were talking about rescuing I think some of the marine mammals from the area is that a relocation to a different area and do they home back to the Gulf of Mexico or how does that all process there were two different situations we were talking about for rescue one is the need for some intervention in Barataria Bay and there's no translocation or relocation of those animals at this time the other one I was speaking of was Brazil where dolphins are being basically trapped in a shallow warm part of the Amazon river and would benefit from translocation if they were stable enough for that to occur and so that's why there's a whole group there now that's evaluating how could those animals safely be moved with veterinary care and monitoring through the translocation process but if we go back to the Barataria Bay dolphin situation which has that restoration activity as planned for that area where fresh water will be diverted in there has been a lot of thought about do we just how do we mitigate the negative impacts that we expect to happen to the bottom of those dolphins living there there's 2,000 about now and if they all go extinct that means there'll be 2,000 that die with 25% of those losses in the first year so that's a large number of dolphins that would be in distress and then eventually washing up and so there's been good discussion about what would you do to help move those animals we've done site fidelity surveys where we put satellite tags on many of those dolphins that we've examined and they don't move they stay for lack of a better term their home bodies there's a lot of bottomless dolphin populations that act like that others will migrate along the coast their coastal dolphins these are they live in Barataria Bay they reproduce they feed they do everything there so some of them have a very tight home range of just a couple miles so it's unlikely that even in the face of a fresh water dropped that the animals will move so could you move 2,000 dolphins where would you put them like how does that alter the species in terms of their genetics and dynamics so a lot of questions remain about how to handle that situation well just to expand that's a big question I would think with regard to the climate change issue because you have some species that are going to migrate as a result of the climate change birds being a great example and then you have others that are sort of trapped and so then we have to know how to handle each one individually in order to help resolve the concern that might be occurring for those species while we're still dealing with what to do about climate change so I think that's the more I'm learning about it the more I'm interested in how do we successfully parse out okay for these species they're going to be okay moving north or south we're going to not worry about them these species moving is going to be a problem so we got to address that or if they do move it will be a problem because they'll be a new predator or a new prey species in a new environment that's right and I'll just follow up by saying those all will come with animal welfare and ethical considerations as well as the biological considerations so it will be interesting to make sure the right people are at the table to help address all those different dimensions of the issues if you do determine a species can or cannot be moved or isn't stable enough to be moved so it's a great thing to be thinking about yes it's the freshwater incursion common to many of those sorts of mitigation efforts because I thought that in a lot of places a big problem was the saltwater incursion into the low lying land too yeah it depends on the species in the area and so if the question is are the animals used to freshwater influxes certainly when it rains and there are parts there are bodies of water where there will be freshwater influxes and then there are management activities in the Gulf of Mexico and different bass sounds and estuaries they'll divert rivers and when flooding occurs they'll need to move water but there are some species that cannot tolerate those significant shifts some will move away some won't and will just be injured by the freshwater influx so I'm not sure if I completely address your question but there are management activities that just have to move water around in order to prevent flooding of different human areas human communities I think I was sort of more asking is that a common strategy what they're doing is that a common strategy in similar sort of ecological environments because that's just one of many it's just the beginning of it I wouldn't call it a common strategy I would say it's been it's been utilized before but this is in the marine mammal community being seen as just a significant strategy that is going to have consequences for the marine mammals that live in that in that area so yeah something like this has not occurred before in that area of the country oh yes Roz yeah thanks thank you Cynthia for a really terrific presentation it's just an amazing body of work and as those of us who work in the aquatic environment with wild marine mammals know it's incredibly difficult to get that kind of detail biomedical data so it's just it's really great work one thing I was wondering with I know you have an extensive amount of data and over 13 years now and I don't know if it's long enough or if you have the right types of data to determine and those animals that do reproduce successfully are you seeing evidence of transgenerational effects on the physiology function or pathology in the f2 essentially the second generation in yeah that's hi Roz great to see um yeah they uh it's early so it's a long live species and it is early to know for sure if there will be the next generation or transgenerational impacts we are seeing that in the successful females some of those we're not alive at the time of the spill and so we're we don't have enough animals enough data to say for sure that that is an important factor but it makes sense with the rest of our data to believe that that's going to be how it plays out so we'll have to see how the data comes in but it will need probably decades more until we know for sure that it's not transgenerational I will say with the pulmonary with the lung disease I didn't go into the detail of the lung disease but the good news is that we are seeing chronic progressive lung disease and the animals alive at the time of the spill which has absolutely been correlated with pregnancy failure in terms of maternal illness and leading to that placental dysfunction in the animals that were not born yet we are not seeing the same incident of moderate to severe lung disease there's animals so far are coming out to be healthier and so again that also supports that we are hoping that we will see this pregnancy failure are sorry the pregnancy success rate increase and we were just back this summer the data is too early to to know for sure but we're hopeful that we'll start to see that that rate increase the success rate increase great thank you great talks and actually my comment or question could be asked of any of the talks speakers today but I want to address you specifically and also Claire you know Claire when you presented about the you know the sex is a biological variable and the effort that it took to overcome resistance to studying females as well as males and the ongoing issues with that I think that the same applies for study of pregnant individuals either humans or animals there's a lot we don't know about pregnancy and maternal adaptations to pregnancy and reproductive tissues as a reservoir for infectious disease and how you know there's long-term impacts that affect successful pregnancy so I wonder about that in in these issues that you guys have brought up any of the speakers that how our lack of knowledge about maternal adaptation to pregnancy or as a reservoir for disease or what not impacts your work yeah it it does impact the work so for the the GOMRI the Gulf of Mexico Research Initiative funding that was available and I don't know how many are familiar with that with that funding opportunity but it was millions of dollars that were set aside from BP and given to an end they set up an independent funding organization that was headed up by Rita Colwell and they just did fantastic work in distributing the money that infusion of funding across the board advanced science just leaps and bounds and so marine mammal science and our understanding of dolphin reproduction really changed over the three to four years that we were able to focus so we're starting to address some of these really important questions and and like I mentioned we were able to go back into the archives with the Navy animals and look at decades of successful reproduction it was harder because of the the smaller numbers of failures there's a lot of questions still there but we're starting to get closer to understanding risk factors diagnostic signals of what does the placenta how is it changing what does it look like when it changes when it's infected with brucella what's the likelihood that that pregnancy is going to fail and so we're starting to fill in those gaps which is extremely helpful and I think we'll have significant overlap in applications to endangered species medicine as we get into the need for reproductive assisted or reproductive efforts to really help these species along and make sure that they continue to thrive Sonic can I just add something to this the idea of thinking about pregnancy and and and we've talked a lot about surveillance and mostly around zoonoses but the idea of animal surveillance for non-communicable diseases that we know are that there are a number of anthropogenic changes that are impacting and particularly our evolution and climate and on premature birth in humans and so one of the I was at a conference where people were discussing well in non-human just sticking with mammals in non-human mammals in shared environments females what is happening with pregnancies are there species survival events that are related to premature I mean there are just any number of questions to ask that have been pretty ignored and are pretty fundamental yeah I mean in the dog genome study I mean it seems like there might be a lot of overlap for looking at genes and the environmental impacts that you're talking about yeah and I would just add to that I'm just pulling up some some data that I had on this whole topic it's really sex as a biological variable goes well beyond just pregnancy so it's impacting things neuroscience for example how brains are different but in lots of ways brains aren't different between males and females as well and there's been this assumption like just decades of assumptions made but it's never been looked at so the the plan to go forward in this is to kind of just answer a nice set of questions is it known that the disease processor event applies to only males or only females is there evidence that there are differences in how a particular disease incidence occurs how the treatment acts etc how could sex influence the process and if there's no reported difference in the literature is it because it's not been studied or reported and so even beyond that which was Cynthia there's just an example here that the sleeping drug Ambien was tested mostly in male animals and in clinical trials and was later shown to be far more potent in women because it was metabolized more slowly in the female body and interestingly across all drugs women tend to suffer more adverse side effects and overdoses this has also been true major depression and post-traumatic stress disorder are twice as prevalent in women but test design and to make the symptoms in rodents are typically developed and validated in males so it goes on and on and on and I went back to that at least so we're starting to address it but it's like my point in bringing up that it's been six seven years now since that mandate from NIH everything we do is just it's going to be a slow like there's always going to be the resistance that you know brought up it takes time for people to accept that change and it's why I threw in that change management slide because as we're moving to embracing more aspects of conservation diversity wildlife conservation patterns all of these things we have to get people to think outside of their own little world I believe and how it can impact them so part of that openness back to Barbara's question initially is we have to make this relevant we have to draw people's emotion into it we have to try to find a tie so that they think that it actually impacts them too and I think there's lots of ways to do that successfully yes yes Tracy you're on just thinking about this conversation that you were just having there's a fair amount of work in remembles showing high levels of exposure to pollutants you know Cynthia was talking about oil but there's a lot of contaminants that have ended up in the ocean and whether it's PCBs DDTs or flame retardants and this question around sex is really interesting there's been a lot of studies that have documented that when females give birth they dump that contaminant load into the fetus and a lot of studies still trying to understand the long-term effects of that of course we know that there's been some studies shown that the levels that you're finding in rememble tissues is way above immune disruption that you know what we know from experimental studies or from reproductive failure in people and yet these animals are surviving out there but we don't really understand the long-term effects on the calves and we also don't understand the interplay with those contaminant levels and diseases and then the males don't have that same opportunity to offload contaminants and so this sort of understanding about sex and sort of life history and timing of life is really important and making sure that we're looking at all those various variables in terms of trying to understand are our oceans cleaner, always successful how are these contaminants changing? Thank you. Do people have questions? Yes. I appreciate that because that prompted when we're thinking about studies of behavior we're so much we have yet to learn I think about behavior of all these species and I loved the trafficking dots that Steve was able to show where the females act very differently than the males and all the impacts that that has as well just just I would never even have considered that but it completely makes sense once it's explained and we have some data to look at it so I think there's there's so much yet yet to be learned and so in my world when people are like well you know we shouldn't be setting animals at all it's it's going to be really helpful that this board can say but we're animals holistically and we're getting away from the lab animal term because it's it's really animals period that we need to study more great are other questions for Tracy I had one question at the end of your talk you mentioned this success with Marburg kind of early detection and an intervention that that reduced what could have been something could you tell us a little bit more about what what specifically you guys did. Yeah honestly I'll credit that part to the work that the CDC did so initially often we found that and we worked to train the labs in the region to be able to detect Marburg virus not just Ebola Zaire so that was you know many of the essays were focused on that and then also working with many of the clinics to make sure that when they were seeing hemorrhagic disease that Marburg was also on the the list of differentials so interestingly we were working with some teens for example in Tanzania and immediately they were asking because of request from their government was could we share essays that would allow them to detect Marburg virus so I think was a combination of CDC starting that work and then through USA funds able to build that capacity in other labs in Africa so it both both raised the awareness and then the ability to do the testing I think Marburg is probably not as infectious as Ebola Zaire so perhaps we would have had limited outbreaks anyway but the fact that we were able to mount responses much more quickly certainly helped to get the word out and to limit contact and cases Dr. Goldstein I had a more of a curiosity question in your presentation when you're talking about surveying all the different species for coronavirus was that just looking at respiratory viruses or were you also picking up you know FIP and the cat and the domestic animal and mouse hepatitis virus and the mice yeah so we were using broadly reactive assays so we absolutely were detecting anything we were finding canine coronavirus in dogs a number of different hepatitis viruses in mice and then we did find 2 to 9 E for example in primates and in humans and so we were looking broadly we were not at the time focusing specifically on respiratory viruses thanks first question is one health is great because it is so inclusive and real world but also strategically challenging because it's so broad is it possible to develop an overarching one health strategy or is it really a set of principles good question I think that one health is an approach I don't think my opinion not a strategy right it's a way to look at complex problems and bring in various parts of the sector to answer that so if you're talking about emerging and infectious diseases that might look different than if you are talking about addressing extreme heat such as we saw the summer in Colorado so really about looking across the sectors and looking across the partners and bringing in the appropriate partners I think one of the difficulties with that and you know we can hear more from sort of our State Department colleagues is that it is difficult to break down silos and work across sectors and then funding streams and Cynthia mentioned that too funding streams often go along those silos and so I think we definitely have some challenges in terms of how can we both bring in the right partners, communicate results and then also have funds that can be used across sectors to address complex problems I'll leave it to others to add more. Okay I'll just add to that Tracy and I'm not you two are definitely the experts but I'll just say from my perspective as we're thinking about you know these marine mammals specific problems and wildlife problems I see it more of a mindset and making sure that when we're approaching our problems we're thinking about it holistically and how does it interface with human health with other animals with the environment and with the planet as a whole and so I think it can be overwhelming for us as that aren't the experts and our more practitioners and trying to make sure that we're really embracing what you're trying to implement is that we're just we just needed to focus on that right mindset and not be laser focused on a single species or a single problem I agree with great responses on one health. I think there was a time where everybody wanted to do one help and it was sort of like fairy dust and people wanted to spread it everywhere I think that's because it wasn't well defined and I think we've got a better sense of the holistic approach that it represents but I think it starts with addressing the problem defining the problem because not all problems are necessarily going to be one health problems and I think it's been alluded to in a number of presentations a transaction cost of working cross-sectors are significant that's why it's often not done so for me if I see a problem that requires that type of work then you can justify the transaction cost but I think that step in some cases has been skipped in the past because it was just sort of well we're just going to do one health and in many cases we need to I mean a lot of these are complex wicked problems but I think sometimes we have to keep in mind that it takes more effort to work across sectors and as was said funding streams are almost never tailored to that type of cross-sectoral engagement which is I think that Tracy used the word approach the one health approach and actually that point about it's being so broad and we can see it as a confluence of all kinds of ideas and how nice that is in the multilateral negotiating context that's actually kind of a problem because it's a way that it can get thrown out like hey we don't know what it is so we're not going to agree to it so somebody mentioned in one of the talks the INV negotiations on the pandemic instrument and there's a whole focus wonderfully so on one health and there's discussions now about what is it going to say in there so what is the WHO led negotiations what are they going to say about one health and so a group like ours what should really care about defining a little bit of what are we in some settings it's fine to be super inclusive and enormous and then some settings we should be willing to come to some kind of agreement on what part of the one health approach matters here why are we using it what are our results or what impact are we really looking for and that touches on the investment in time and money thanks I see some interesting parallels between the term one health and three hours so three hours having come up in 1960 and now there are three our veterinarians and people didn't know that at companies they're hired specifically I'm not really sure what for but they are doing work in this space because it's very broad and so I think it's a good question that was raised but I still think it's okay to have three hours and have lots of different compartmentalizations within that now and same for one health it almost becomes like a brand and then so what does the brand represent and it allow I believe it doesn't have to be one thing it has the nimbleness and flexibility to be co-opted by anybody and leveraged in a lot of different ways and so I think it can be really positive in how we use it yeah and just briefly to build on I think in just sort of your comments on the IMBE convention I think in that situation it is really clear what we're trying to address right and this is zoonotic diseases you know for pandemic prevention and I think there it's very clear that there's a direct link between animals and human disease and that contact and so I do think it's important that the right people are at the table to craft that language because what often happens and I know everybody in the room knows this is that investments start out by saying we need to invest in animals and we need to invest in wildlife and it's so important and then very quickly the funding shifts to focusing on the public health system which obviously needs funds as well and then the next outbreak occurs and we're back where we started again so I think in this situation it is really important that we expand what we consider our surveillance system and that we invest not just on the human health side but on the animal health side because otherwise we're just going to continue to be in this chasing our you know responding constantly situation we have to do something different the welfare issue and one health that you had mentioned earlier the awkwardness of those discussions I think apart from the Cambodian monkey imports the other big thing that hit the news were the 4,000 beagles that were confiscated from breeding facility and one wonders how does this kind of thing happen in this day and age and I think it is largely driven by the money behind all of this and the people who are employed by this so lab animal veterinarians are typically not at the forefront of animal welfare in these large overarching incidents that occur like this it tends to be people that we consider extreme so sort of animal rights people and that division really shouldn't be happening lab animal vets tend to be employed by the biomedical industry and it becomes very awkward within 5 minutes to have any kind of nuanced conversation about welfare about supporting biomedical research the USDA inspects all of these facilities often their relationships with the biomedical industry that tend to be a little bit more comfortable and again awkwardness creeps in so there has to be some way to have these nuanced conversations that's a safe space where it doesn't get so polarized we have only one or two more minutes and I did there's a question from an audience member so I just wanted to direct it towards you thank you first for our last speaker is the United States supporting the UNEP project to study how animal welfare intersects with environmental and human health that would be the United States supporting it yes it's a question is the US supporting the UNEP project so I think that there's a call for funding I don't know specifically how much the US is giving we are one of the largest the United States is one of the largest donors to the United Nations and to UNEP so I would say broadly speaking we are supporting UNEP and are we specifically donating for that call for funds for that study I'm not sure so I don't know where that's that stands I just know that we were instrumental in getting that resolution passed and supporting it well it's it's 15 after the hour and it's time we it's time to break but I know this conversation is going to continue I want to thank all of our speakers it was really phenomenal I mean one of you is just doing such important work and communicated so effectively to all of us so this is just the beginning we're thrilled that you were here at our inaugural Basker meeting and we're going to take a short break and come back the board members will come back thank you