SICK SAMSON: The juvenile elephant on the right, Samson, nearly died from an endotheliotropic herpesvirus infection at Baltimore’s Maryland Zoo.THE MARYLAND ZOO IN BALTIMORE
In late February 2013, Mike McClure and the rest of the elephant team at the Maryland Zoo in Baltimore grew concerned about their calf, Samson. It was hard to pinpoint, but having raised the almost 5-year-old African elephant calf since birth, McClure knew something was wrong. “I looked at him and just noticed his behavior was off,” he recalls. Maryland Zoo head veterinarian Ellen Bronson agrees: “He was just very slightly not himself.”
The team sent blood samples out for analysis, and after a few inconclusive tests, a positive result confirmed their worst fears: Samson was infected with elephant endotheliotropic herpesvirus (EEHV), a virus commonly carried by adult elephants that can be deadly when acquired by a calf. “[The diagnosis] was devastating,” McClure recalls.
Researchers first discovered EEHV in 1995, after a 16-month-old Asian elephant calf named Kumari at the Smithsonian National Zoological Park in Washington, DC, suddenly fell ill and died in a matter of days. Zoo pathologists Laura Richman and Richard Montali performed a necropsy of the young elephant and found ...
