The vaccine protects the marsupials from the sexually transmitted disease, which can lead to blindness, infertility and death.
Conservationists in Australia have begun vaccinating wild koalas against a highly contagious and deadly form of chlamydia.
The disease can also cause infertility in females due to large cysts growing in their ovaries, which has massively decreased koala birth rates."It's been devastating — there's very, very low fertility," Mathew Crowther , a conservation biologist at the University of Sydney who monitors koala populations, told AP News ."You hardly see any babies."In 2020, researchers developed a vaccine for the disease , which was successfully given to some captive and rescued koalas.
The conservationists construct circular enclosures around the bases of eucalyptus trees that koalas are spotted in. When the koalas eventually come down, they are forced to go through trapdoors and into cages. But it can take hours or even days for the treehugging marsupials to make their way down to the ground.
Scientists were initially unsure why chlamydia had spread so fastamong koalas over the past 15 years. But in 2018, researchers discovered that a large proportion of Chlamydia-positive koalas were also infected with a virus known as koala retrovirus type B, which can suppress their immune systems like the HIV virus does in humans. As a result, chalmydia can easily jump between individuals.
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