Familiar Enemies Australia Discovered 1606 British colony est 1788 Commonwealth 1901 The Feral Flyer European rabbits introduced to Australia by Thomas Austin in 1859 proved to be the perfect invasive species destroying cattle and sheep grazing lands mainstays of Australian agricultural economy They also out competed endemic marsupial species driving many to the brink of extinction Kill the Wabbits Kill the Wabbits Poison baits were laid using automatic hand operated machine or carts Fumigating machines were used to pump poson gas cyanid smoke or carbon monoxide down into rabbit warrens Trappers or Rabbiters trapped rabbits and so did school children for pocket money A Drop in the Ocean Cyanide in water and strychnine in oats were most commonnly used Other animals fell victim also Rabbit Proof Fence In a desperate effort to stem the rabbit infestation the longest fences in the world were built Rabbit Biowarfare In the early 1930s Dame Jean MacNamara and others called for the importation of the South American myxomavirus as a means of rabbit control Lionel Bull Chief of the Commonwealth Division of Animal Health and Nutrition released the first myxomainfected rabbits November 16 1947 on Wardang Island South Australia Myxomavirus released in 1950 is estimated to have killed 500 million invasive rabbits on the Australian continent Malaria Plasmodium 40 world s population in over 100 countries is at constant risk from this vector borne protozoan disease 3 500 million cases yearly 2 million deaths yearly Mostly children and pregnant women Malaria and Sickle Cell Sickle cell phenotype Hemoglobin S allele is characterized by pain crises and anemia exhaustion with sickle ing red blood cells being quickly removed from the sufferers blood Despite its debilitating effects the manifestation of heterogeneous sickle cell disease engenders survival in malaria endemic regions Gonorrhea Neisseria gonorrheae bacterium Symptoms inflammation pain and pus One of the oldest documented human infectious diseases Isolated in 1879 cultivated in 1882 First cured by penicillin in 1944 5 First documented penicillin resistant microbe Infects epithelial cells lining the male urethra female vagina and cervix Asymptomatic infections are common Difficult to diagnose in women Inflammation causes male and female infertility Neisseria gonorrheae it s all in the genes Populations of this bacterium provide the exception to the clonal multiplication rule Neiserria gonorrheae swap DNA horizontally so frequently as match the gene shuffling results achieved by sexually reproducing organisms Thus every Neisseria gonorrheae culture consists of thousands of unique individuals Overview South American myxoma virus was used as biocontrol agent to kill European rabbits in Australia in the 1950s Six years after introduction the remaining rabbit populations selected for were mostly virus resistant and myxoma viruses isolated from those rabbits were mostly nonlethal Malaria is the deadliest infectious disease caused by the Plasmodium protozoan spread by the Anopheles mosquito to 3 500 million people per year killing over 2 million Areas of indigenous malaria contain a highly proportion of humans with the hemoglobin S sickle cell gene because it enhances resistance to malaria infection Gonorrhea caused by the bacterium Neiserria gonorrheae is a sexually transmitted disease proven impossible to eradicate due to its mechanism for constant and extensive genetic variation asymptomatic ways and bad human behavior