Several years ago, in the thick of the Covid-19 pandemic, Dr. Lily Parkinson, who was working as an emergency and critical care veterinarian at the University of Georgia, began getting calls about snow leopards. By then, the coronavirus had jumped into a variety of zoo animals, but snow leopards seemed to be getting unusually ill. Some were developing severe anemia, a shortage of red blood cells that can leave the body critically short of oxygen.
Had the patients been human, or even domesticated cats, treatment would have been fairly routine: a transfusion of red blood cells, sourced from an established blood bank.
But there were no blood banks for snow leopards, and veterinarians knew little about blood types and compatibility in exotic animals. So zoos scrambled to find suitable blood donors. Institutions with healthy snow leopards offered to sedate their animals, draw their blood and send it to Dr. Parkinson, who just happened to be in the middle of a research project on blood types in large, wild cat species.
But the logistical challenges were enormous, and in many cases, insurmountable. The zoo employees who were needed to collect the blood were out sick. Samples were lost in the mail. “Other zoos that really wanted to donate and help were just not able to drop everything that they already had on their schedule,” Dr. Parkinson said.
In the end, some of the leopards’ health deteriorated so fast that they had to be euthanized before transfusions could be arranged.
Today, Dr. Parkinson, now a clinical veterinarian at Brookfield Zoo Chicago, is trying to lay the groundwork for a resource that might have given some of these animals a chance: a blood bank for zoos and aquariums, stocked with prescreened blood from a menagerie of exotic animals.
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The post She Wants to Start a Blood Bank for Zoos appeared first on New York Times.
