Dear Caving Friends,
As you might know the presence of the White Nose Syndrome fungus (WNS), that have already killed more than one million bats in the USA (cf. <
http://www.caves.org/WNS/>), has been detected in Europe (Dordogne, France). All the details about this presence has been stated in the article of Sebastien Puechmaille from the University College Dublin - Ireland :
<
http://www.cdc.gov/eid/content/16/2/pdfs/09-1391.pdf>
For the moment no fact has established that European bats would risk the same situation as in the USA - the researches are still going on - , but of course the principle of prevention has to apply. In the European speleological community, Italy seems to be the most advanced at this level since the SSI has sensitized its cavers of the risk and has already established preventive measures for the cavers in Italy not to be a factor of spreading the WNS outside of the caves they explore. The SSI document is available on :
- English version :
<
http://www.eurospeleo.org/main3/papers/wns/precauzioni_WNS_ITALIA_Eng_.pdf>
- Italian version :
<
http://www.ssi.speleo.it/it/download/WNS/WNS-SSI.pdf>
Face to this situation, the FSE is creating a "European WNS work-group", coordinated in a first period by Ioana Meleg, ECPC president, who will have the following objectives :
- Gathering all the available information on WNS in Europe
- Establishing what could be the proposals of European preventive measures according to each phase of the situation (present, pre-epidemic, epidemic, etc).
- Making proposals to the European speleological community and collect the expressed remarks
- Making the link with the situation in each country
- etc
Sebastien Puechmaille has informed us about his agreement to be part of this workgroup.
If you have information about WNS in your country or in other areas, or if you are interested to participate to the work of this European work-group, please send an email to : <mailto:wns@eurospeleo.org>
Of course we invite every motivated person to participate, it would be important to have at least 1 or 2 persons per European country.
Looking forward to reading you soon,
Best wishes,
for the/pour le Bureau,
Olivier Vidal
Secr. General FSE
European Speleological Federation
+33 6 81 61 16 70
Email : <>
contact@eurospeleo.org
Web : <>
www.eurospeleo.org
Forums : <>
http://fsue.org/forums/
