Half Europe's seals to die due to virus-scientist
Date: 05-Aug-02
Country: SWEDEN
The epidemic, which is currently taking most of its toll among harbour seals in the straits of Kattegat and Skagerrak which separate Denmark from Sweden, resembles a similar plague which 14 years ago wiped out half of West Europe's seal population.
"We modelled the epidemic in 1988 and once the epidemic starts it is almost impossible to stop," said Tero Harkonen, who leads the Swedish research team studying the current epidemic.
So far 2,500 dead seals have been found in the water between Sweden and Denmark, and the epidemic is expected to spread to the Wadden Sea area of the Netherlands and the German coast where only 180 dead animals have been found up to now, Harkonen told Reuters.
But the phocine distemper virus (PDV) was expected to fade out by the beginning of October and would probably not spread to the British Isles as it did during the 1988 epidemic.
So far it is unclear what caused the outbreak, in which the seals suffer a painful death as the virus erodes their immune system and they die from pneumonia-like symptoms.
The 1988 epidemic also had political consequences in Sweden, where the Green Party benefited from extensive TV coverage of dying seals and came from nowhere to win 5.5 percent of the vote and 20 seats in parliament in a general election.
Sweden is facing a general election again in September this year, and political analysts say the new seal plague could help the struggling Greens to stay above the four-percent vote threshold for representation in parliament.
Scientists see the current epidemic as a chance to learn more about the animals, and have organised an international research team to gather specimens from the dead seals.
In Tjorn, an island northeast of Gothenburg in southern Sweden, biologists were busy taking specimens from 40 seals found dead in the past days, and they received constant calls from nearby communities to pick up more bodies blown onshore by a harsh wind.
On Friday the wind was still so strong after an overnight thunderstorm that damaged buildings and roads on the nearby island of Orust that researcher Anna Ansebo said it would be impossible to retrieve the dead seals by boat until the weather improved.
