Wildlife experts battling a mystery disease which has killed half the world's population of Tasmanian devils said yesterday that the illness could prove as hard to eliminate as HIV or SARS.
Devil Facial Tumor Disease (DFTD) has nearly eliminated the marsupial predators from the eastern half of Tasmania and there are signs it is spreading to populations in the west, said Nick Mooney, a wildlife management officer with the island state's conservation department.
The disease manifests itself as small lesions and lumps around devils' mouths which grow into cancerous tumors on the face and eventually spread throughout the entire body.
PHOTO: AFP
Death occurs within three to five months, usually from starvation as weakened animals lose the ability to compete for food.
Mooney estimated that from a high of about 150,000 in the mid-1990s, the population of Tasmanian devils has been slashed to 75,000 by DFTD, an illness about which pathologists know little.
"The state population has halved already," he said.
Devils -- muscular, short-legged animals the size of a small dog but with jaws powerful enough to crush bones -- live wild only in Tasmania. There are only about 120 of the animals in captivity, all but one of them in Australia.
The threat to Tasmanian devils is such that the Hollywood entertainment giant Warner Brothers -- which made the feisty creatures internationally famous through the cartoon character "Taz" -- approached state officials to learn more about the crisis.
Experts from around Australia and beyond gathered in the Tasmanian city of Launceston earlier this month to develop a strategy for finding the causes of DFTD and battling the disease.
"Our big problem is that we don't even know for sure if this is an infectious disease or not," Mooney said.
"A retrovirus seems the most obvious suspect, but not all the cancers are caused by these," he said.
"The thing which seems clear is that there is a suppression of the animals' immune system for dealing with cancer, but the pathologists say we might be years away from finding the answer," he said.
Mooney says it is unlikely DFTD will wipe out the iconic Australian marsupial.
"There have been no clear examples of infectious diseases wiping out whole populations of animals because as the animals become rarer, the rate of transmission falls and the population recovers," Mooney said.
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