Watch: Experts puzzled by elephant’s death due to human form of TB

While concerns abound that elephants in the Kruger National Park are still at the risk of human-borne tuberculosis (TB) after one was killed by the disease in 2016, experts say it was still a mystery how that elephant contracted human TB.

Following years of blood sample testing, to screen the larger part of the elephant population, according to South African National Parks (SANParks) experts, only six to nine percent of the tested animals had showed signs of having being infected.

According to SANParks veterinarian Dr Peter Buss, although it was nearly impossible to treat individual free-ranging animals for a disease like TB, the aim of the sanParks TB study was rather to better understand the disease’s prevalence in the wild population.

“We have to imagine that this elephant could have gone out to communities and gained access to food, but that is just a guess,” Buss added.

“The reason we can’t treat them is that if you consider how to treat a human with TB, it takes anywhere from six to nine months to treat them with daily tablets, so there is just no way to implement that treatment regime in a free-ranging wild animal.”

During a visit to the country’s main national park, Buss and his team took aim at a young bull elephant which was about 14 years kruger PARK: aim of study is to understand contraction and impact Jumbos tested for human TB old to deliver a 10 milligram dose of thiafentanyl, an opioid, and azaperone, a tranquilliser, into the animal’s hindquarters.

This after more than 30 minutes of trying to dart an older bull elephant and the helicopter pilot trying to guide it into a clear area. But it decided to run in the opposite direction.

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However, Buss and the pilot spotted another one which was much more tractable and with the doses contained in the dart, the drugs took full effect, after roughly eight minutes.

He stumbled around the veld far from the prying eyes of tourists and finally fell on his side as the helicopter hovered overhead. Buss said one of the procedures was a bronchial wash, in which sterile fluid would be pumped into the animal’s bronchial tubes, sucked back out and stored for later laboratory analysis.

“The point being that if the elephant has got active TB, and has lesions in its lungs, and they’re shedding organisms into their respiratory tract, then by putting the fluid in and sucking it back out you hope to recover those organisms,” Buss said.

South African research chair in animal tuberculosis at Stellenbosch University, Professor Michelle Miller, said they were hoping to get more information to better understand how the animals were infected and how it would impact on them in the long term.

“We didn’t think that elephants were necessarily affected by TB, such as buffalo and lions are, but since that time we have developed a testing programme to look for the bacteria in respiratory secretions,” she said.

Miller said an animal could have the disease for more than 20 years before symptoms show, which had been detected in zoo elephants. Apart from the one that was found dead in the park, there were no other such cases. Meanwhile, large mammal ecologist of SANParks Dr Sam Ferreira said there were more than 31 000 elephants in the park.

The pattern of increased numbers was the opposite of what was happening in other larger parts of Africa.

“We always hear that there are too many elephants in Kruger, that there will be some ecological consequences, like the breaking of trees,” he said. But there is no evidence of that, he said.

– reitumetsem@citizen.co.za