A perhaps fanciful idea would be to deploy sentinel animals, much like the coal mine canaries that died quickly if noxious gases started seeping in.
Several organizations offer analytical services to test sentinel animals or excreta for contamination with defined microorganisms.
What we are looking at is having what we call sentinel animals on the farm that are providing information back to the farm managers," Dr Elliott explained.
Jonathan Day, an entomologist at the University of Florida's medical entomology lab in Vero Beach, says that, compared with analyzing trapped mosquitoes or finding infection in sentinel animals, the new technique could essentially cut in half the time it takes to detect and respond to an outbreak in a new area,.
The usual methods for detecting mosquito-borne viruses all have a weakness: Relying on clinical diagnoses means a disease has already arrived in the population; keeping "sentinel" animals is costly, and the animals themselves provide a food source for mosquitoes; and capturing thousands of mosquitoes and analyzing their RNA is expensive and labor-intensive.
CO-oximetry was performed weekly using sentinel animals.
The specific pathogen-free nature of the animal colonies was demonstrated by testing sentinel animals.
Sentinel animals were sent for serological testing every 3 months and the results were uniformly negative.
Initial EDTA blood samples were taken from sick or sentinel animals, while spleen samples were taken at post-mortem.
Starting 15 days post-injection with JeKo-1 cells, a time when established tumor burden can be documented in sentinel animals, mice (5 per group) received vehicle alone (64% saline, 12% ethanol, 24% PEG-400) or AR-42 at 20 mg/kg every three days via intraperitoneal injection.
Although some VACV strains had consistently been isolated and re-isolated from Brazilian forests using mice as sentinel animals [22], we describe for the first time the isolation of a VACV strain from a Mus musculus mouse captured in the context of a BV outbreak.
