60 Minutes interview
A powerful Oct. 4 interview airing on CBS' 60 Minutes with Robin Reid, director of Colorado State University's Center for Collaborative Conservation, highlighted the remarkable Serengeti-Mara wildebeest migration, the largest remaining migration of large mammals on Earth. Reid talked with 60 Minutes correspondent Scott Pelley in Kenya about the challenges for the survival of this 1.3 million-strong herd, including issues of deforestation, low river flows, rising human populations, and climate change. In June, we reported on Reid’s research on the decline of wildlife in the Masai Mara National Reserve, where six species have decreased substantially in only 15 years as they compete for survival with the region’s growing human settlements. Before serving as center director, Reid worked with the International Livestock Research Institute in Nairobi, Kenya, where she led research and education on conservation and development issues in Africa, Latin America, Asia, and the western United States. Reid also has served as a senior research scientist at Colorado State's Natural Resource Ecology Laboratory and is on the faculty in the Department of Human Dimensions of Natural Resources and the Department of Forest, Rangeland, and Watershed Stewardship. Access "The Great Migration" on the 60 Minutes website.
Testing TB tests
How tuberculosis is studied in laboratory settings may not realistically model many human infections, says a Colorado State University researcher, and that discovery has earned the scientist a New Innovator Award — and a $1.5 million grant over five years — from National Institutes of Health. Diane Joyce Ordway, CSU assistant professor of microbiology, discovered that laboratory strains of tuberculosis do not invoke the same response in hosts as the strains that infect most people worldwide. Many of these high-virulent strains are resistant to multiple drugs, and Ordway has initial proof that the strains cause the host’s immune system to stop working, making the illness particularly lethal and difficult to treat. Ordway has also discovered that current laboratory models of TB infections in the host may not accurately reflect the immune-system response of infected humans. A drug that treats tuberculosis in a novel way has not been developed in decades, and the bacterium that causes the disease continues to become resistant to current drug approaches. About 9 million people are infected with tuberculosis each year, and 2 million die. Of the new cases, nearly half a million are resistant to multiple drugs that once effectively treated the disease.
Record enrollment
Counter to national trends, Colorado State University had a record total enrollment for the fall with 25,413 students, including 21,204 undergraduates, 3,671 graduate students, and 538 professional veterinary medicine students — an increase of 1.6 percent from last year's enrollment of 25,011. A total of 4,285 new freshmen enrolled this fall, which included 3,350 Colorado residents and 935 non-residents. Last year's freshman enrollment was 4,404. The University had a record applicant pool of 15,354, where first-generation college students made up 25 percent of this year’s freshman class. CSU's freshman class is the most academically accomplished in its history with an average high school GPA of 3.57 and 24.6 ACT score.
Humans in the wild
Wildlife and Society: The Science of Human Dimensions has received the 2009 Wildlife Publication Award as outstanding edited book from The Wildlife Society. Three of the book's five authors/editors are Colorado State University professors. The book addresses the growing discipline of human dimensions of wildlife management, which considers such issues as managing conflict among competing wildlife interests, ensuring the safety of people who encounter wildlife, and controlling poaching while helping create sustainable subsistence hunting. "Increasingly ... managing wildlife means managing people," says Michael J. Manfredo, co-author and head of CSU's Department of Human Dimensions of Natural Resources and of the Department of Forest, Rangeland, and Watershed Stewardship. The discipline has emerged in the last 25 years to help in the "people management" of protecting wildlife, says co-author Jerry J. Vaske, professor in the Department of Human Dimensions of Natural Resources. The volume addresses research and application of such topics as subsistence and bushmeat in Africa to the decline of recreational hunting in the United States, notes co-author Esther A. Duke, also with CSU's Department of Human Dimensions of Natural Resources. The Wildlife Society was founded in 1937 as an international professional and educational non-profit association that encourages wildlife professionals to conserve, promote, and sustain wildlife resources for society's benefit.
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