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UW’S CLAIMS OF DIVERSITY 4 CROSSING THE SPECIES BARRIER
Crossing the species barrier: Primate virus could infect humans
UW researchers show SHFV could infect humans, highlighting importance of emerging infectious disease research
by Mahak Kathpalia Science News Reporter
In the wake of recent outbreaks of diseases like COVID-19 and monkeypox, an increasing number of researchers around the world are working to preemptively identify possible emerging infectious diseases.
In a recent study by the University of Wisconsin School of Veterinary Medicine, Professor Tony Goldberg identified cell surface receptors that allow the Simian hemorrhagic fever virus to enter human cells. While SHFV is typically found in African wild primates and no infections have been reported in humans yet, Goldberg said it could potentially cross the species barrier and become a zoonosis — a disease animals can transmit to humans — in the future.
Scientists first discovered SHFV in 1964 when macaque monkey colonies died from Hemorrhagic fever in the U.S. and Russia. But the virus’s distribution in wild primates remained unclear for a long time.
Goldberg and his collaborators from UW were the first few people who discovered SHFV’s wild origins in Kibale National Park, Uganda and sequenced its genome in 2011.
“I decided to look for unknown viruses in the monkeys and this was just becoming possible because of technological advances in DNA sequencing,” Goldberg said. “So, we took a look and Simian hemorrhagic fever virus was one of the viruses that popped right out. We were surprised because we weren’t looking for it. We like to say we didn’t find SHFV, but SHFV found us.”
There have been numerous emerging virulent and zoonotic diseases like HIV and Ebola, both harmful viruses originating in animal populations.
To predict whether a pathogen like SFHV could cross the species barrier, Goldberg said it is essential to gain deep knowledge of its basic biology. This knowledge includes studying which cell receptors a pathogen uses, the kinds of cells it commonly infects, how quickly the virus replicates in its host and whether it mutates.
After 10 years of extensive research on all these features of SFHV, Goldberg and his colleagues found both monkeys and humans share the cell surface receptor for this SFHV.
“The virus can latch onto the human receptor just fine,” Goldberg said. “The virus seems to be able to pass between primate species very easily without any problems with replication and it doesn’t even mutate that much. All those things — together with the fact that these viruses are distributed all throughout Africa and many primates at high levels interact with people — [made] us realize that this could potentially be a zoonosis.”
According to one study, for a pathogen in animals to transform into a pathogen exclusively infecting humans, it must go through a couple of intermediate stages. The pathogen needs to first cause a primary infection by crossing the species barrier. Next, it must start circulating through the human population without the help of the animal host. Lastly, once a lot of rounds of transmission between humans begin to predominate, it can be successfully characterized as a human infectious disease.
While Goldberg and his team said they believe this virus could jump into humans and cause primary infection, it is much harder to predict whether it can persist in the human population because of the complexities associated with successive stages.
Professor in the Department of Pathobiological Sciences in the UW School of Veterinary Medicine Thomas Friedrich said viral transmissions between animals and humans are very common since the human body harbors “a biome for the virus” and other factors help regulate the emergence of infectious diseases.
“Humans get infected with animal viruses all the time, but most of the time, they don’t notice that they are infected — a few cells in a human are infected and that’s it,” Friedrich said. “Or they get a little sick, or maybe they even get very sick and die, but that virus does not get out of that person.”
Goldberg and Friedrich said it is still crucial to engage in genomic surveillance to rapidly identify pathogens like SFHV in populations that closely interact with animals worldwide. Researchers could develop diagnostic tools to test for the pathogens they keep an eye on and start proactively making a library of vaccines against them, according to Goldberg.
Despite its benefits, Friedrich said it could often be difficult to gather resources and garner support for such research, even in studies related to existent human pathogens.
“Once an outbreak is contained and the threeto-five year funding cycle ends, people [think it] is not a problem anymore,” Friedrich said. “That happened in 2014 [with Ebola]. It was really scary, but there are only really small outbreaks now. It’s not a big deal. So, it’s hard to get funding for that.”
The aftermath of the COVID-19 pandemic has started to shift this trend. The scientific community is receiving more support for building pandemic preparedness.
Different organizations are allocating more of their budgets to fund research on monitoring potential pathogens. The National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases awarded approximately $36.3 million to academic institutions for research in developing vaccines for a diverse family of coronaviruses in 2021.
“I think now finally we are getting to learn that we need to maintain this infrastructure that we built to monitor the spread of SARS-CoV-2 and its evolution so that we can feed that into updating vaccines,” Friedrich said. “We need to diversify that so we can detect and characterize new pathogens and know what’s going on and have ways to mitigate the situation. So we need to maintain funding, public support and policymaker support for pandemic preparedness in all of its forms.”
The Loka Initiative: What climate scientists can learn from religion
The Loka Initiative partners UW researchers with faith leaders
by Scott McInerney Science News Editor
Dekila Chungyalpa found success merging faith and conservation in the Himalayas. While there, she realized the environmental conservation movement should work with religious groups to improve environmental practices.
Now, Chungyalpa is the Director of the Loka Initiative in the Center for Healthy Minds — an interdisciplinary program which supports faith-based environmental and climate efforts. The Loka Initiative launched in 2019, and they have partnerships with evangelicals, First Nations and Tibetan Buddhists.
“Our goal is basically to activate and support faith and Indigenous communities to be as resilient as possible when it comes to environmental and climate issues, because those are the biggest stakeholders,” Chungyalpa said.
While they are often forgotten as stakeholders in the climate issue, many faith leaders across the world support climate solutions, Chungyalpa said. In fact, over 80% of the world subscribes to a faith, and faiths collectively own over 8% of habitable land. They also are collectively the third-largest category of financial investors, Chungyalpa said.
Chungyalpa is working to bring the forces of faith and science together to address climate issues. The Loka Initiative does outreach and partnership events to connect University of Wisconsin researchers and faith leaders. Through these partnerships, faith leaders can learn from experts while informing them on what their faith values in the climate movement.
Recently, The Loka Initiative held a public event where they hosted a panel of climate scientists and evangelical leaders from across the country. The event was the end of a gathering called Creation at the Crossroads, where church leaders and pastors came together to discuss creation care — caring for God’s creation. The event was designed to promote healthy discourse surrounding climate change and creation care in Christian communities.
Creation at the Crossroads connected pastors with three UW scientists, who trained the pastors on topics such as biodiversity, conservation, global public health and climate projections, Chunyalpa said. The training helped pastors understand how the climate and environment are changing and how they can address it in their own congregations.
“Here is this perfect example of how religion and science come together to strengthen one another,” Chungyalpa said. “Because the religious leaders were also informing the scientists on, ‘These are the kinds of communications that actually work for our communities, and these don’t.’”
The Loka Initiative is also funding a research project that is studying ecoanxiety and climate distress, Chungyalpa said. The project focuses on developing resources for managing those emotions and channeling them into activism and other pro environmental behaviors.
Kirstina Fiedler is a fourth year undergraduate at UW working as a program assistant for the Loka Initiative. She felt powerless to the world’s problems during the pandemic, but when she met Chungyalpa last spring she felt empowered to join The Loka Initiative.
Fiedler said the Loka Initiative is developing a course about eco-anxiety, going with the initiatives focus on mental health. The Loka Initiative works to connect people with eco anxiety to communities, many of which are faith-based, that can make them feel empowered towards climate activism.
“I think what’s so powerful about Loka is that it really gives you hope that your actions matter and your voice matters and like, you can do something and you’re not just an observer. It’s like you have some control,” Fiedler said.
When developing The Loka Initiative, Chungyalpa wanted to use religion to fill knowledge gaps in the climate movement. To achieve this goal she planned to build partnerships with faith groups that global environmental groups don’t represent.
She said Indigenous people are often underrepresented because they are place based, or dependent on location. Representation of these communities can be conflated, and many will associate representation of one Indigenous group with representation of all Indigenous groups, which means the values of some Indigenous people can go underrepresented. The Loka Initiative works to bridge that gap without bringing in their own agenda. Chungyalpa said a foundation of The Loka Initiative is that they are entirely informed by the values of their faith partners, such as Indigenous elders.
“I think this is an example of how Loka works. When we say we are in partnership, we take it really seriously,” Chungyalpa said.
Chungyalpa said that working with First Nations elders, they really try to listen to the environmental values of their communities. She said First Nations don’t want to use technical scientific terms when talking about these issues, as they believe it creates a separation of natural things.
The Loka Initiative is currently working on a documentary with the First Nations of Wisconsin, Fiedler said. The film will explore traditions of the First Nations and how they manage the land sustainably.
Though she is just getting started in the climate and faith fields, Fiedler is amazed by how the connection of faith on environmentalism comes together at an international level.
“It’s incredible how international this movement is,” Fiedler said. “I would love to continue working for the local initiative and continue this work. I think I’m definitely like just getting started.”
PHOTOS COURTESY THE LOKA INITIATIVE. The Loka Initiative connects faith communities and climate and environmental scientists.
Paper Cuts Deep
Evolution of Wisconsin’s paper industry
by Lydia Larsen Science News Editor
When Mike Grosskreutz started working at the Wisconsin Rapids paper mill in 1980, he thought his job would last until retirement. After all, the paper mill was the place everyone in the area wanted to work. Forty years later, Verso, the then owner of the Wisconsin Rapids paper mill, announced their plan to shut down the mill in June 2020.
“Morale dropped quite a bit,” Grosskreutz said. “Kind of like you’ve pulled the rug out from everybody’s feet. And nobody knew what to think or do or say.”
Verso said the decision to close the mill stemmed from COVID-19 pandemic, which caused a sharp decline in demand for the glossy magazine paper Wisconsin Rapids mill produced.
The Wisconsin Rapids mill was one of the last paper mills in the state to produce magazine paper, though Wisconsin Paper Council Executive Director Scott Suder said the paper industry is more than just printing paper. Wisconsin’s paper mills produce tissue products like toilet paper and napkins, specialty paper products used in food packaging, cardboard box material and more.
“You know, paper is not just what people might think of, just white paper,” Suder said. “Fiber and paper making is in almost every aspect of our lives. Not just paper toweling, but it’s in aerospace. It’s in your car, it’s in your phone, it’s in your clothing.”
Wisconsin’s paper industry is as old as the state itself, with Wisconsin’s first paper mill starting production in 1848. Wisconsin leads the nation in the number of paper mills, number of paper industry employees and amount of paper sold, according to a 2019 report from the Wisconsin Paper Council.
Wisconsin’s paper industry generates about $18 billion and employs over 30,000 people, making it the fifth-largest manufacturing sector in the state. At the time of the report, Wisconsin had 34 paper mills. There are now 32, according to Suder.
Wisconsin’s paper industry has grappled with shifting consumer demands and transitions in company ownership for the last few decades. While some paper mills have evolved to meet these new demands, others don’t receive the investment they need from their owners, leading to shutdowns, lost jobs and detrimental impacts on communities across the state. Shredding of an Industry
Wisconsin Rapids is one of the latest mill closures in Wisconsin’s paper industry. In the past three decades, at least a dozen paper mills closed with many sitting empty, undergoing redevelopment or being sold for parts.
The reasons Verso gave for the shutdown didn’t satisfy the 900 employees who lost their jobs, Wisconsin Rapids Mayor Shane Blaser said.
“There’s lots of ‘Why here? Why now?’” Blaser said, “You know, what’s wrong with our mill? Why, isn’t it marketable? Why isn’t another company interested in buying it? What’s wrong with it? What’s it going to take? You know all those questions are kind of up flurrying around.”
Other industries have expanded into Wisconsin Rapids, and people found new jobs at those companies or other nearby paper mills, Blaser said. While there is no tracking mechanism for where the employees ended up, Blaser estimates that about one third of the employees retired following the announcement.
Tim Pavlik is the president of United Steel Workers Local 2-94, the union that represented the Wisconsin Rapids paper mill workers. After the initial shock wore off, he worked with other local leaders to help the employees find other employment opportunities through job fairs and career assistance programs.
“From when they announced in June till the mill shut down in August, we had a very, very short time period,” Pavlik said.
Two years later, things have settled down in Wisconsin Rapids. But, the city’s economy still feels some of the effects. The shutdown lowered the city’s median income, Blaser said, making Wisconsin Rapids a less attractive location to retail outlets that are looking to expand in the area. Residents drive to nearby Plover to shop, but many want to see more retail in their own city.
The mill closures in Wisconsin Rapids are not an isolated incident. In the late 2000s, many paper industry employees came to University of Wisconsin-Oshkosh director of customized research and services Jeffery Sachse with their concerns about the paper industry when he worked for the Wisconsin Department of Workforce Development. At the time, paper companies had started shutting down smaller paper mills and moving their production to larger facilities.
Like Wisconsin Rapids, paper mills can close due to a decline in demand for the type of paper they produce. But economic incentives and a lack of connection between out-of-state companies and the communities who run the paper mills has also led to paper mills closing across that state.
In the 1970s, privately owned paper companies started turning to private equity firms for money to invest into their paper mills, Sachse said. Because of this change, the families and individuals who actually ran the paper mills gave up their position as the company’s main decision maker. The new leadership often chose to restructure the company.
These changes often took the form of bankruptcy proceedings and merging companies under new ownership. As a result, a lot of paper industry leadership left the state. This change then opened up Wisconsin’s paper industry to management decisions made by people who don’t live and work in Wisconsin, Sachse said.
Before out-of-state companies and private equity firms owned many of Wisconsin’s paper mills, most were run by families and companies based in the same community. In Wisconsin Rapids, the Mead family owned the paper mill for most of its history. When there were no family members left to take over, they sold the company and its paper mills.
“It kind of had this aura about it and the history and the community but that all changed once it became no longer locally owned, and it just became a business and a balance sheet for somebody,” Blaser said. Before Paper, Comes Pulp
Industries and communities outside of Wisconsin Rapids felt the effects of shutdown too — one such industry being pulp production. The Wisconsin Rapids paper mill was the state’s largest consumer of pulpwood, which comes from trees that don’t meet the quality standards for lumber and are instead used to make paper. Pulpwood is broken down into wood fibers — pulp — then reformed to create paper products.
When the mill closed, professional loggers in Wisconsin’s northwoods didn’t have a place to sell their pulpwood.
The day Verso announced they were shutting down the Wisconsin Rapids paper mill, Dennis Schoeneck had five trucks of freshly-cut wood ready to head for Wisconsin Rapids. Then, a friend who worked in the logging industry advised him to call Verso. When he did, a mill employee told Schoeneck that as of 4 p.m. that day, the paper mill was no longer accepting wood shipments.
“I sent two of our trucks down there and that was it,” Schoeneck said. “So I didn’t get … a month, I literally got four hours. Talk about a
shock to a system.”
When the mill closed, there was a flood of pulpwood on the market, which caused the price to drop, Schoeneck said. Many Wisconsin loggers went out of business, but Schoeneck managed to hang on. While his logging business generates enough revenue to make a living, there isn’t enough income to invest in new equipment.
When loggers struggle, forest health struggles too. UW professor and wood products specialist Scott Bowe said loggers play an important role in managing the state’s private and government owned forests.
To manage a forest correctly, loggers can’t go in and only take the valuable wood that goes into lumber. Loggers must take the pulpwood and there needs to be a market for it, Bowe said. When some northeastern states lost portions of their paper industry, it impacted the management of their forests because there was nowhere to sell the timber once it was harvested.
A managed forest has younger, healthier trees, stores more carbon and experiences less disease, Bowe said. People see the deforestation happening down in South America and assume loggers do the same in Wisconsin, but the state is actually gaining forest land.
“So, in Wisconsin we talk about healthy forests depending upon a healthy forest products industry,” Bowe said. “So, if we don’t have an industry that wants to use those raw materials, we have no financial incentive to manage our forest.” Repackaging The Narrative
Though some say the paper industry is declining in Wisconsin, Suder said the paper industry is far from dead. While Wisconsin lost several paper mills in the past decade, the industry has diversified and companies have become more specialized. So, while the industry has consolidated, production in Wisconsin’s paper mills is going strong. Suder pointed to Green Bay Packaging as an example of growth in Wisconsin’s paper industry. In 2021, the company began production on their new $500 million paper mill. The mill holds the first new paper machine the state has seen in over 35 years. The new Green Bay Packaging paper mill was designed to be more environmentally friendly than a traditional paper mill, which uses a lot of water and energy. The new paper mill has a net zero water certification and uses more recycled material in their production process. The company also switched from coal boilers to natural gas, which cuts down on sulfur dioxide and nitrogen oxide emissions. Unlike Verso, Green Bay Packaging is based in Wisconsin and operates paper mills locally. While the Wisconsin Rapids mill made magazine paper, Green Bay Packaging makes the material used in cardboard boxes. Green Bay Packaging’s new mill is part of an emerging generation that produces different products than traditional magazine and printing paper. The industry is evolving toward more specialty papers, such as food packaging, labels and materials used in corrugated boxes. In fact, Wisconsin is Amazon’s number one producer of cardboard boxing materials, Sachse said. But even if older paper mills want to get into the packaging and cardboard market, they can’t simply transition from producing white or magazine paper to specialty papers and containerboard, Sachse said. Without companies making a large investment, older mills don’t have the right equipment that would allow them to move into more lucrative paper markets. While paper mills produce different products today, they also look remarkably different than they did 30 years ago. Mills are undergoing the process of automation, with much of the equipment becoming digitized over the past several years. Anyone walking through a modern paper mill will see very few people on the floor with the machines and more people monitoring operations in windowed offices, Sachse said. There is a strong demand in the industry for technically skilled workers — one that is not being met. With the loss of the traditional aspect and the effects of an aging work-
force, the industry struggles to efficiently replace outgoing employees. UW-Stevens Point associate professor Roland Gong said mills are now looking to fill these positions with engineers. Though most of his paper science and chemical engineering program’s graduates end up with high paying jobs in the paper industry in Wisconsin, it is still in need. The ‘Mill Bill’
Constant shutdowns and ownership changes take a toll on people who work in the paper industry. The Great Lakes Timber Professionals Association was one group who wanted to take matters into their own hands — they decided to form a co-op after the Wisconsin Rapids mill shutdown.
Forestry professionals watched for years as different entities came in and purchased paper mills. These companies didn’t reinvest in the paper mills and instead sold them off a few years later, Great Lakes Timber Professionals Association executive director Henry Schienebeck said. These constant changes affected loggers across the Great Lakes region.
Schienebeck wanted the loggers and the community to control their own destiny. For a couple years before the Wisconsin Rapids paper mill shut down, they discussed the idea of forming a co-op. They thought if they owned and got the community involved in managing the paper mill, they could run it wmore efficiently, Schienebeck said.
“If you’re an owner of something, you take better care of it, right?” Schienebeck said. “If you had to earn it … you just do all these things that make it more cost-effective to run. That’s the model we were using, and still are using.”
The Great Lakes Timber Professionals Association partnered with local representatives to find financial resources for the co-op to buy the paper mill. This “mill bill” would have provided the co-op with funds to start the process of buying the mill.
While both the state Democrats and Republicans wanted to pass the bill, it quickly became a partisan showdown over where to obtain the funding. Republicans wanted the money to come from the American Rescue Plan Act funds, which were designed to help businesses affected by COVID-19. Democratic Gov. Tony Evers wanted to use the state’s general purpose revenue funding.
The “mill bill” passed the state Legislature, but it never went into effect because Evers vetoed it. Evers said that American Rescue Plan Act funds are not suitable for the long term investment the project needed. He also cited legal problems that could arise if the federal government didn’t think COVID-19 directly caused the mill closure.
After Verso closed the Wisconsin Rapids mill in 2020, the company merged with BillerudKorsnäs AB, a Swedish paper company. The Swedish company is currently running its paper mills in Escanaba and Quinnesec, Michigan, with no apparent plans for the Wisconsin Rapids paper mill.
Wisconsin Rapids hired a company to do a redevelopment study using a federal grant, Blaser said. The report isn’t finished yet, but it will include some options for redevelopment of the mill property now that the mill is no longer running. Grosskreutz said there was hope that someone would buy the Wisconsin Rapids paper mill for a couple years, but now too much time has passed. The machines will no longer run correctly after sitting idle for so long.
Grosskreutz got his full retirement, but he took a job operating a dump truck in the summer for a landscaping company and became an ordained minister.
Despite all the changes, Pavlik believes there are still opportunities in Wisconsin’s paper industry.
“The paper industry has opportunities,” Pavlik said. “I believe that. I [also] believe that it’s a different industry than it was when I got into it 27 years ago. My father was a 48 year employee at Consolidated Paper and it was different when he got into it. So I think it’s continuing to be a strong part of Wicsonsin’s economy going forward.”
Grosskreutz said there was hope that someone would buy the Wisconsin Rapids paper mill for a couple years, but now too much time has passed. The machines will no longer run correctly after sitting idle for so long.
Grosskreutz got his full retirement, but he took a job operating a dump truck in the summer for a landscaping company and became an ordained minister.
“Of course I would miss somewhere I’ve been for 40 years. What I’m doing now, I enjoy it,” Grosskreutz said.
Despite all the changes, Pavlik believes there are still opportunities in Wisconsin’s paper industry.
“The paper industry has opportunities,” Pavlik said. “I believe that. I [also] believe that it’s a different industry than it was when I got into it 27 years ago. My father was a 48 year employee at Consolidated Paper and it was different when he got into it. So, I think it’s continuing to be a strong part of Wicsonsin’s economy going forward.”
