Lawmakers are looking for new programs that would improve surveillance of wildlife in order to gather clues about the onset of avian influenza and other diseases.

Animal experts say monitoring changes in disease patterns for wild animals can flag potential threats to livestock and humans as well.

Diseases in wildlife populations can mutate to effect humans, such as the avian flu, or can be transmitted to livestock with disastrous economic consequences, like mad cow disease.

Wildlife Center of Virginia President Ed Clark said the goal would be to create a surveillance network like that of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, first in the United States and eventually around the world.

“We’re looking at providing a smoke alarm,” Clark said.

Experts say the federal government is spending too much money tracking livestock and birds but not investing in wildlife. New legislation is being considered that would create a federal wildlife information network.

A bill (HR 1405) approved by the House Foreign Affairs Committee in March would start the Wildlife Global Animal Information Network for Surveillance (GAINS). Through the Agency for International Development, it would provide $50 million over five years to detect infectious diseases in wildlife and delineate threats to domestic animals, livestock and humans.

A similar bill (S 1246) was introduced in the Senate on April 26.

“Wildlife GAINS would be a comprehensive tool to prevent the outbreak and spread of new diseases that have no treatments or cures,” Joseph I. Lieberman, I-Conn., said on the Senate floor April 26. “We must prevent and detect the next generation of infectious diseases to prevent the pain and suffering that diseases such as HIV/AIDS and H5N1 have caused millions all over the world.”

The effort would include federal and state agencies, as well as food organizations, wildlife groups and academic facilities from around the country. The sites would test for the avian flu and other pathogens, and the United States Agency for International Development would create a database of information on outbreaks and disease prevention.

Clark said more than 100,000 wild animals are treated each year at clinics like his, representing more than 2,000 species.

“That’s a pretty darn good snapshot of what’s going on in wildlife,” he said. “There are ample sources of information that are not networked in any way, shape or form.”

Spotting trends in animals can have a real effect. When one of Clark’s colleagues saw similar eye infections in house finches in the 1980s, there was great concern that poultry could be susceptible. In the end, the disease was determined not to be contagious to chickens, but the alert to poultry producers led many to increase their fencing to keep finches out.

Similarly, he said, sickness in ducks near a water supply could show you that the water supply is contaminated, perhaps from terrorists.

“It’s the old canary in the coal mine,” he said. “If your cat and you are subject to the plague on the same day, the cat is going to die before you get sick.” Animal surveillance can help brace for, and mitigate, what is yet to be diagnosed in people.

Joshua Dein, a project leader for the Wildlife Disease Information Node at the National Wildlife Health Center, said there’s a great deal of crossover between diseases in humans and wildlife.

“Understanding wildlife disease gives us a better understanding of what’s out there,” he said. “And once you know what’s a baseline, we can determine problems for wildlife and how it can affect domestic animals and humans.”

Dein and others said concerns about avian influenza have helped raise the awareness of animal surveillance, and they hope the tools crafted for bird flu will be expanded.

Currently, the federal government is targeting its bird flu surveillance to birds, which has a proven link to the H5N1 avian influenza strain.

Karen Eggert, spokesman for the U.S. Department of Agriculture Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service, said about 84,000 bird samples were collected last year, along with 50,000 environmental samples.

“The framework we have put in place for highly pathogenic avian influenza helps us research other diseases in the United States,” she said.

Clark said he hopes the government will expand its research beyond birds and livestock, and toward wildlife.

“So much of the surveillance that is going is so focused on areas where we are already looking,” he said. “The whole notion that somehow the thousands of other species out there are irrelevant to the spread or detection of disease is myopic thinking.”

Matthew E. Berger can be reached at mberger@cq.com.