School Notes: School of the Environment
September/October 2012

Preserved frogs hold clues to deadly pathogen

A Yale graduate student has developed a novel means for charting the history of a pathogen deadly to amphibians worldwide. Katy Richards-Hrdlicka, a doctoral candidate at the Yale School of Forestry & Environmental Studies, examined 164 preserved amphibians for the presence ofBatrachochytrium dendrobatidis, or Bd, an infectious pathogen driving many species to extinction. The specimens dated to 1963 and were preserved in formalin at the Peabody Museum of Natural History. Bd is found on every continent inhabited by amphibians and in more than 200 species, and causes chytridiomycosis, which is one of the most devastating infectious diseases to vertebrate wildlife. By charting the time and locations of infected amphibians, Richards-Hrdlicka’s work will enable researchers to look to the past for additional insight into the pathogen’s impact.

Bangladeshi women choose traditional stoves despite risks

Women in rural Bangladesh prefer inexpensive, traditional stoves for cooking instead of modern ones, despite the significant health risks associated with their use, according to a Yale study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. In most rural homes, where there is no electricity, food is cooked over an open fire using wood, agricultural residue, and animal dung, known together as “biomass.” This practice results in 50,000 deaths in Bangladesh a year and over 2 million worldwide, due to the production of toxic indoor smoke.

A 2008 survey of 2,280 Bangladeshi households revealed that 98 percent of that country’s 131 million people cook with biomass using traditional indoor stoves, and 92 percent of respondents had never even seen a nontraditional cook stove. A large majority of respondents—94 percent—believed that indoor smoke from the traditional stoves is harmful, but less so than polluted water (76 percent) and spoiled food (66 percent). Still, when offered a hypothetical choice, Bangladeshi women opted to keep their traditional cook stoves and spend money on other basic needs.