This Podcast Will Kill You - Special Episode: Chlamydia, Koalas, and More!

Episode Date: April 19, 2022

Chlamydia trachomatis may have stolen the show in our last episode, but there are many other Chlamydiae that deserve some time under the spotlight. In this bonus episode, Dr. Martina Jelocnik (@MartinaJelocnik) and Dr. Sam Phillips (@Sam_Phillips_83) from the University of the Sunshine Coast in Queensland, Australia, join us to chat about some of these other Chlamydia species and the effects they have on wildlife and domestic animals. Curious about koalas and chlamydia? This episode will bring you up to speed on how these charismatic creatures are impacted by Chlamydia pecorum as well as current research efforts towards a vaccine to combat this pathogen. Wondering about psittacosis and birds? Or livestock and Chlamydiae? We’ve got you covered there as well! Tune in this week for a truly fascinating deep dive into the wide world of these pathogens! See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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This is a job for Indeed Sponsored Jobs. Hi, I'm Aaron Welsh, and this is This Podcast Will Kill You. Welcome, everyone, to the latest bonus episode in our mini series of bonus content that we've been putting out over the past few months. If this is your first time tuning into one of these bonus episodes, I'll give a brief rundown of what I'm doing with them, so you know what you're getting yourself into. In each of these bonus episodes, I'm following up our last week's regular season episode by interviewing an expert about some aspect of the topic that we covered last week, and getting to explore it. in much more depth than we did in the regular episode. And also, I'm asking these experts about their careers, what they like about them, how to get started, and any advice they may have for people who are interested. I've had so much fun putting these episodes together so far,

and I've learned an incredible amount about fascinating topics ranging from deadly rabbit viruses to how electricity actually works and beyond. I am super pumped, for this week's episode because it combines two things that I didn't expect I would ever get to talk about at the same time. Quallas and sexually transmitted infections. In last week's episode, Aaron and I covered chlamydia, specifically the different ways that different strains of the bacterium chlamydia trachomidus can cause disease in humans, diseases such as the classic Chlamydia S-T-I, the eye infection trachoma, and lymphogranuloma veneerium. We discussed how these obligately intracellular pathogens complete their life cycle, how they cause the

signs and symptoms they're associated with, the long history of their involvement as human pathogens, and where we stand today in terms of the global prevalence of these diseases. If you haven't listened to that episode yet, I'm going to recommend that you pause this, go listen to it, and then come back. because that episode will give you some good background on these bacteria in general that will probably help in terms of providing more context for this interview today. Okay, so what are we going to be talking about today? Even though we covered quite a bit of ground in our regular season chlamydia episode, more ground than we expected to cover, in many ways we only scratch the surface of chlamydia.

because the world of these bacteria is much bigger than just what the human perspective shows. Chlamydia are found in all kinds of animals, from birds to free-living amoebae, from sheep to salmon, from cats to koalas, and across all continents. They're everywhere. And while some species of chlamydia or chlamydia-like organisms don't seem to have a very strong impact on their hosts, others absolutely do. For instance, Chlamydia Pecoram, a species nearly ubiquitous in livestock around the world, has had devastating impacts on koala populations in Australia. And maybe you're familiar with this topic from headlines a few years back talking about One Direction and koalas in Chlamydia. In any case, these population declines have generated a substantial amount of research into understanding how chlamydia is spreading among koalas,

and in creating tools that might be able to help us slow or stop transmission, with one of these tools being vaccines. From this research, we have learned an incredible amount about chlamydia pecorum, and not just as it relates to koalas. While the koala chlamydia relationship might be the one most likely to be splashed across headlines, Chlamydia pecoram can infect many animals, and several other chlamydia species can carry great importance for other wildlife, for domestic livestock, or as zoonotic pathogens of public health importance. But we don't yet know quite as much about those host pathogen relationships. So it seems like what we need is a complementary approach, conducting more in-depth studies on koalas, chlamydia and vaccines, while also performing more experience. research on how chlamydia pecorum and other chlamydia species impact other wildlife and domestic livestock. In this bonus episode, I am beyond thrilled to talk with two scientists, Dr. Martina Yelochnik and Dr. Sam Phillips, both at the University of the Sunshine Coast in Australia, whose research aims to do exactly that.

These two super cool chlamydiologists have been examining questions of clenched. Chlimydia in Australia from these different but complementary angles, and I can't wait to hear what they have found. So let's get to it. We'll take a quick break here, and then I'll let them introduce themselves. Hi, I'm Martina Yalochnik, and I am veterinary chlamidian, veterinary molecular microbiologists from University of the Sunshine Coast here in Queensland, Australia, and I work on veterinary chlamydia, livestock, birds, koalas, and all the other animals. Sam Phillips and I also work at the University of the Sunshine Coast at the center of bio-innovation. I work with Martina for the last five years and I'm a molecular microbiologist

working on the koala chlamydia vaccine as well as some other human chlamydia projects as well. Well, wonderful. Thank you both so much for agreeing to chat with me today. I am very excited to talk so much more about Chlimidia than I ever thought I ever would. So let's dive in. I was wondering if you could start off by telling me a bit about your educational journeys. Did you always know that you wanted to be a scientist, or was that something you discovered later on? So I always wanted to be a scientist ever since I was in high school in Australia. I had a interesting journey moving through a diploma in laboratory sciences to fine-tune my dinner shows up every night, whether you're prepared for it or not.

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Go to quince.com slash this podcast to get free shipping on your order and 365-day returns, now available in Canada, too. That's Q-U-I-N-C-E.com slash this podcast to get free shipping and 365-day returns. Quince.com slash this podcast. Doctorate techniques and then an undergraduate and honors degree. My honours degree was actually in looking for vaccine targets in chickens for a disease known as cannibalobacter. From there, I actually worked in diagnostics, diagnostic pathology and human pathology

for seven years and then moved over into research where I was a research assistant for five years working in human papillom virus vaccine analysis within. in Australia, as well as some chlamydia projects, which got me interested in Chlamydia and collaborating with my eventual PhD supervisor, Peter Tims, and came up to Sunshine Coast to work on the koala, Chlamydia vaccine for my PhD. And since then, I've continued working with Peter on the vaccine and now the lead postdoc research fellow running four different vaccine trials. Well, as you can see, I have a... a little bit of accent.

So I'm actually not originally from Australia. I come from Belgrade, Serbia. Since I was young, I was influenced by my aunt, who was a doctor. So I always wanted to be a medical doctor. And I was just so fascinated when she was talking about disease and microbiology. So as such, I did medical high school in Belgrade and I started medical uni. but because we moved like a family to Australia. So then I had to postpone a little bit my educational journey.

So I wasn't a citizen and the universities were then a little bit expensive. So I had to wait until I become Ozzy, then take a loan and dive in back into the study. So I did undergrad's majoring in microbiology. So yep, I always stayed true to my micro. It was ride or die. And that continued with honors and continued with PhD in microbiology. And in honors is where I first heard about this pesky chlamydia. So everybody was talking, call it clameedia, collaglamydia.

But there was another host livestock. And I was thinking like, okay, well, nobody's talking about livestock. I'll do it. Let's see what happens there. And we're same. So we are actually within the same group. We had the same supervisors. And I'm kind of like that child that never wants to leave home.

So then I stayed with my PhD in Clamedia and I got my fellowship again on Clamedia, but this time on a slightly different Clamedia. So we started looking at Clamedia in Birds, some novel Clamedia that it doesn't get much attention in Australia. And I'm still here and I think we will see what future holds. But now we are also looking at chlamydia and other bugs because clomedia, it's never there alone. Interesting. Wow, what amazing journeys.

So I have another question for you before we dive into chlamydia talk. And that is advice. Do you have any advice for someone who might be interested in pursuing a career? career in STIs or wildlife disease or One Health, anything you wish someone had told you at the beginning of your career? My journey into where I am now, I've learned a lot along the way and I made some mistakes and then I moved back into it. And I think don't be afraid for people wanting to get into research in general, but into

SCIs and vaccines to start off in something which it could open the door to something you've never thought of before. I started out in HPV vaccine research, which is, it's already developed. And I thought, well, there can't be that much research. We're really giving it to people. But there's so much more you can learn. So don't close your mind off to thinking that if something's already well known, don't, yeah, there's still lots more that we can learn.

And the SEIs, they have commonalities between the different species. And so there's different antibiotics treatment between, say, like Climiter and gonorrhea and macoplasmos, all basically the same antibiotics, and they share different mechanisms. So I don't think you just pigeonhole down to the one organism. You can always move on. So my advice to young scientist is collaborate, collaborate a lot,

because you need those connections. We need to connect with our vets, with our JPs, with our researchers, researchers who work on a slightly different aspect of the host that you may do. that is the only way that you could get the full picture. And then by collaborating and I often say talking with way smarter people than me, I continuously learn a lot. And then I pick up something that I didn't talk of it. So for me, big part of what I do, it's a whole plethora of collaboration from vets,

from the producers, because especially in livestock, look, they are the ones who are feeling the effects of this disease on the farm. So we need to go from the producer to the vet, to the diagnostic laboratory team, to us in research, to all of our colleagues around the world. So I would say collaborate early and collaborate with good people and with a good team. When the collaboration cannot be sustained, that's okay too. Both excellent pieces of advice. All right.

Now let's get into some chlamydia talk, specifically chlamydia pecorum. Who does this pathogen infect and how is it transmitted? Chlamydia pecorum, although globally it's probably known as the notorious koala pathogen, actually is not. I often say it's a livestock pathogen more than anything. So infects a wide range of livestock, including cattle, sheep, goats, as well as wild ruminants, such as, let's say, reindeer, water buffaloes. And recently we also worked on studies when we detect chlamydia pecorum in birds.

How is it transmitted? We think that it's most likely fecaloral transmission, but it can also be from direct contact, which Sam can explain, like when you have two qualifying, you know, they can kind of touch each other and maybe transmit, or when the sheep or catalytic in the close contact so they can transmit, let's say, ocular chlamydia pecorum infections, but most likely it's a fecaloral. And how is it different from chlamydia trachomitis? I mean,

chlamydia trachomotis is a human-specific pathogen, right? But are there any overall big picture differences between those two species? The differences between pecorum and chocomotis are that pecorumat can infect a variety of different hosts. Tricomavirus is strictly a human pathogen that doesn't, we don't find it anywhere else. We can't even get it really to infect mice, whereas Pecorah will infect, yeah,

as 19 have mentioned, a range of different host species and sites. As far as disease and infection roots, they're fairly similar. I mean, we know that trachomonas can infect ocular, gastrointestinal, urogenital, quite readily. So that's fairly similar.

in the disease presentations are fairly similar. You do get the LGBV strain, the lymphogranuloma venereal strains of chlamydia, which are slightly different to what we see in animals, although that could just be that we're missing a link there with animals, so more research. And the tissue tropism is really interesting. We've tried many different studies with Bacoram

to identify tropisms based on, usually we look at a single gene, the atom membrane protein, the gene responsible for that is op-A, which we don't find with chlamydia, pecorah or other species of chlamydia, but with trachomitis, it's fairly stringent.

We find that there's specific ocular types and the specific urogenital types. These do you get muddled when you start looking at the gastrointestinal infections, but traditionally you can have the ocular strains specifically, they cannot infect the urogenital tract. That's due to some specific gene mutations that have occurred.

throughout evolution of drachomonas. So yeah, there are the similarities, but then there's also some really distinct differences between them too. Where did Chlamydia Pecorum come from? What are its natural hosts and how did it get into Australia? Erin, that's a $5 million question. I think we moved from $1 million. I'm going to go now into a $5 million question.

So up to, you know, a while, we all hypothesized, oh, yes, you know, Chlamydia Pecorro most likely came with European colonization and with bringing the livestock. Because here and there, you know, using molecular studies, we have these snippets of information which says, oh, you know, you have koala strain that they are genetically similar to livestock. Thereby tantalizingly, we say, oh, yeah, that's the origin. but I was a believer, I was a believer, but then I converted the wider the event. And of course, you know, beyond gene typing schemes, we started looking at the whole genome sequences, again, that's still in infancy for pecorum. And we are seeing very distinct lineages between koala strains and livestock strains.

So then that opens up, you know, new questions. It's kind of like a Pandora box. So you wonder, are we not sampling the intermediate lineage? Are we missing a host? Maybe. We don't know. You know, especially in Australia, we are kind of like a host-centric. So it's either koala is a host or it's a livestock.

But what about everything in between? So we know from our colleagues from Europe. and US that chlamydia can infect pigs, reindeer, chamois, ibex, birds, variety of birds. So honestly, Erin, we do not know. It is very tantalizing to think that we had some that we do have or had some kind of a spillover. But at the moment, we really truly don't have solid information to answer that question. So we need to work harder. we need to sample wider.

We need to sequence way more than we do now in order to answer such question. Amazing. So, you know, as we've talked about, one of the species most impacted by Chlamydia Pecoram is, of course, the adorable and charismatic koala. When did people first start noticing that koalas were becoming infected with this bacterium? As early as European settlement in Australia, there's reports of indications that the koalas were suffering from chlamydial diseases back then. This is all kind of based on observations of disease presentation back in the wasn't a lot of diagnostic analysis specifically for wildlife back then. It gets a little bit confusing.

I'm sure your listeners will know that the chlamydia non-lucleoture has changed over the years. And it's not that long ago that we only discovered that there was more than just chlamydia cytoside, Chlamydia trocometheus out around. So pecoram has only been around for the last 30 years with identification. So, yeah, it's difficult to say how long pecoram has been infecting koalas, but, you know, possibly for at least the last 200 years. What does an infection with chlamydia pecorum look like in koalas? And how fatal can it be?

outside of the top. So in ocular disease, koalas get an infection in their conjunct fiber, and this creates inflammation, which normally your contronct iver is quite smooth, and as it goes over the eyelids, this inflammation causes scouring of the eyelids. You get these like nodules,

and it eventually causes blindness in the koalas in their eyes. In the urogenal tract, chlamydia can ascend the urethra and go into the bladder, this causes cystitis, which is inflammation of the blood of wall. And qualis can carry this for huge amounts of time. They, obviously, they don't have a local GP that they can go and get some antibiotics for.

So they suffer in silence with this disease. And it can end up, I've seen qualis with golf ball size and chronic masses in their bladders from slothing off tissue just from the deceased chronic infections. It can ascend the ureters up to the kidneys. causes lesions in the uridus and then can cause nephritis in the kidneys. Then we also have reproductive disease as well. So there's been some recent reports showing that male koalas can have inflammation in the testes and can affect fertility in males.

And in females, we definitely know that there is reproductive tract infections. There are links to the development of reproductive cysts, which can in turn lead to infertility. How fatal is it? Quala is coming into wildlife hospitals. It changes over the years, depending on breeding season or not. But on average, it's about 50% of koalas die from this disease. It's a horrible disease for them.

They come in with these severe urator infections, and you can hear them, like, crying from the urine. They become incontinent. In severe cases, it stains their fur on their rump so much that they get these extra urigenital abscesses from their constant wet staining of their, rump and they can't sit down and then yeah it just becomes terrible that's that sounds really horrible and how is chlamydia transmitted among koalas i mean a lot of it is still sexual transmission but there's

also the fecal oil route uh we believe that they do get infected when climbing trees this is a koala above them that say urinates with chlamydia infection that could be a spill over to oculocytes and things. We know that some joys do get climonyer infections from infected mothers. Not necessarily through birthing. There's quite a lot of antibacterial properties within the pouch because guile's obviously marsupial. But then once they become a joey and they live on the back, they're crawling all over the mother's back and they can get infected that way. Yeah, there's other speculations, but mostly it's through, yeah, fecal, oral, sexual and then, yeah, mother to Joey. And if a koala recovers from an infection with chlamydia, can it become reinfected or is there any lasting immunity?

We have some evidence to show that infection doesn't give the koala's long-lasting immunity. They can up to maybe a month or so. But we see, depending on the wildlife hospital and the population densities, you can have up to 80% of the koalas that have become infected will eventually come back with new infections. it does differ with the different populations as well. There are effective antibiotics that exist for chlamydia and chlamydia-pacorum, but they aren't recommended necessarily for use with koalas. Can you talk about why that is? Quaralas are really interesting species.

Their diet is based on eucalyptus leaves, which are highly toxic. So the koalas have developed a unique evolutionary trait where they have cytokrome p-450 gene, detoxifies drugs and chemicals. And quiles have a huge repeats in this region, up to 16 repeats in this region, which means they are really good at detoxifying chemicals and drugs and antibiotics.

So a lot of antibiotics that would be useful for chlamydia, they need to be used in such high doses in koalas that it ends up being fatal for the koalas. So it limits the number of antibiotics we can use. The first line of defence for at least the last, 10 to 15 years was chlorophenicol that had shady efficacy in treatment. So it does work, but only 60 to 70% of cases. But that was the only antibiotic that had been trialed and what we could use.

So they were utilizing that, but it also causes gastrointestinal dysbiosis, doesn't work all the time. And when koalas have their gut flora stripped, they can't digest their leaves and they end up starving. to death. So antibiotics are a terrible choice anyway, but they do help in some cases. Recently there was a trial that showed that we can start using doxycycline, which as you can imagine, is a lot wider distribution that's used in humans. So access is no problem at all. Corophenicol isn't using humans anymore. So nobody wants to make it anymore. So it's kind of difficult

to get hold of as well. Antibodies are great for their use in clearing, but they have a lot of side effects as well. So we like to think the vaccine is your best bet. What have been some of the population level impacts of Klimedia Pecoram on koala's so far? And can you also discuss any of the downstream effects that koala population losses have had on other members of the ecosystem? population level impacts of koalas are due to chlamydia. I can't just say that the population is being affected solely by chlamydia. The animals are affected by deforestation, population encroachment onto their habitat.

So as far as directly comparable to chlamydia becoram, it's a difficult question. But overall, koalas, some populations have been completely, they're extinct. So we don't have populations in Queensland that have become, extinct, local populations. And the koala populations in Queensland and southeast Queensland have decreased. They are being listed as endangered just recently. So they've been decreasing ever since they're listed as threatened in 2018. And now they've been further downgraded to endanger. We're seeing this in New South Wales as well. There's a strong decline. This has been impacted by recent fires as well in 2020. So that's almost

sped the decline of these populations. When you get further down into southern Australia, into Victoria and South Australia, the populations aren't endangered. The disease presentation is a lot less. There's other factors. So there's a retrovirus quail, a retrovirus that infect squires,

we believe, has an impact on the chlamydia disease. So we do see a shift of disease prevalence increasing in a southerly direction. The ecosystem, that was a really interesting question. I had to go and school myself a little bit on this. So koalas, obviously, they live in eucalyptus forests. Not a lot of animals eat eucalyptus leaves. So koalas actually help to control the growth of these eucalyptus forests.

They allow for light to be able to come through to the forest floor to increase the biodiversity on the forest floor, which helps the forest floor organisms. So microorganisms, insects, even small. mammals. They also help to control bushfires, surprisingly. So as they keep the growth, eucalyptus growth under control, it's less likely to have a lot of dry leaves and stuff lying around. So there's less tinder for bushfires. And their feces also helps with biodiversity when it rains. It increases the nutrients within the soils and increases all the organisms.

So we always write grants and we just say to the the koalas because they're a huge tourism pool and that's the last species of the Fasculata family and we should do it for human benefit but it actually has benefits to the ecosystem which really gets downplayed I think I mean we've been working I've been working in koalas and five years and I've never heard about these I've never heard people talk about this before so it's I thought it was a hairy question to start with but it's really interesting I'm looking into a bore I'm actually going to go back and read some more about it was quite interesting. So for koalas, is there any individual or population level variation in resistance or

susceptibility to chlamydia infection? So for chlamydia infection, it's similar to chrychrominus that we see in humans. So probably we estimate about 80% of koalas that become affected don't actually develop the disease. So we don't know why that is, though. We do think that the koala retrovis virus has an effect on immune responses to chlamydia, which then allows for chronic infections and development of disease. The population level is difficult. The different populations have different interactions. So in mountainous areas, there's some geographical barriers that stop spread of chlamydia into populations that you would assume interact, whereas in areas where near the coastal areas where there's not huge geographical barriers, the koalas can interact.

between populations. So they're quiet. They can be territorial in their, in their population groups and don't have a lot of exchange between the two populations. So it's complicated question. But we do know that once it gets in there and infects enough koalas, those populations decline and eventually they'll become extinct if we don't get in and do something, especially with this, the other pressures of increased blue fires, decrease forestation, flooding, wild dogs. We had a population that was almost completely wiped out by a single domestic dog. And also, so Sam actually mentioned koala retrovirus, which is a huge viral infection.

But let's not forget that there is a koala herpes virus, that the research is now starting to emerge to suggest that that virus contributes to decreased immunity or, you know, Can deaths now exacerbate chlamydia infection? Maybe. And plus, there are other bacteria also infecting quala. That's what I would say. Clamidia, it's never there alone, exactly. And you never know whether that's antagonistic, whether that's synergistic, mutualistic. We honestly don't know. There is actually so much that we need to look in terms of the co-infections. Yeah. It's such a complicated story. And so what about chlamydia pecorum? Are there different strains across the landscape that are associated with disease severity or different host species?

So, okay, so when we look at genetic diversity of chlamydia pecorum, so what we see, let's say, let's look at koala, koala strains. So koala strains are diverse. They are very genetically diverse, but closely related to each other. We have evidence that show that koala strains infecting koalas in the northern parts of Australia, like Queensland, New South Wales, are genetically distinct than those infecting koalas in SA, South Australia or Vic, Victoria. There, there is a bit of anecdotal evidence that there is a less disease. However, when we look at the genomes of either of these strains, all genomes contains the same, virulence factors. They're highly syncheting, highly conserved. So I would then say that any strain

would have a pathogenic potential. And any strain of this can cause any level of disease. So now that you looked at koalas and we know that they're diverse, we look at livestock. So in livestock, actually, we see a bit of a more disease association. So we have this very interesting clonal lineage. So that's my flavor lineage of the month. It's called Sequence Type 23, and it's associated with polyarthritis in sheep and cattle, sporadic bovine encephalomyelitis in cattle, as well as fetal loss in both sheep and cattle. So these strains are highly clonal, genetically identical, minor differences. And we never see them in koal. So that's a very good thing.

So these guys, this sequence type 23, they are specifically contained to livestock at the moment, as best as to our knowledge, and as best as to our, you know, breadth of sampling. So we do see a bit of an association with a disease, severity, and whole species. But within koala, we do see differences between strains infecting northern versus southern koalas. But honestly, I really don't think that we can say that any qualis change is less or more severe. In a nutshell, they all cause some level of clinical disease. Interesting. All right. We're going to take a quick break here.

And when we get back, I want to shift our attention to some other chlamydia species of public health or veterinary interest. Welcome back, everyone. So far, we've mostly chatted about chlamydia pecorum, and in our regular season episode, Chlamydia trachomitus. But these aren't the only two chlamydia species of public health, veterinary, or wildlife importance. What are some other chlamydia species that we should be paying closer attention to and why? Besides clamidia pecorum, whether it's called our livestock, I would say that a species, that it's wildly research and going par par par with a, you know, clomidia pecorum, eats your good old chlamydia cytosy. So chlamydia cytosy, it's an avian pathogen traditionally, and it has zoonotic potential quite easily can spill to humans and cause disease in humans, respiratory disease, which can be mild, which can be very severe, very severe pneumonia.

And also, chlamydia, cytosia, I love that species. I think I'm blown away by cytosai and its potential. It actually infects extremely wide range of hosts, birds, and there is more than 500 different species of birds, water birds, pigeons, cetacin birds, chickens, poultry, ducks, everything, as well as livestock. You can easily find it in livestock. And we

recently acquired tiny piece of evidence that chlamydia cetacea can also infect marsupials. So we did find it in kangaroos. And of course, zonotic potential and the human infections

they are being constantly reported throughout Europe, USA, as well as in Australia. So in Australia, sitacoza is notifiable disease. So the human cases, they are reportable and notifiable. So that's why chlamydia sitocyte. It's definitely a species that we need to be very much aware about. Anyone who works long hours knows the routine. Wash, sanitize, repeat. By the end of the day, your hands feel like they've been through something. That's why O'Keefe's working hands hand cream is such a relief. It's a concentrated hand cream that is specifically designed

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Learn more at APU. APUS.edu. And you know, grab your docs, your permits, your moves, AI levels of your pitch, gets it in a groove. Choose a template with your timeless cool. The deck so you can build that thing. Learn more at adobe.com slash do that with acrobat. And, you know, the hosts that are infected with CITASI,

they mix with a koala, they mix with your livestock. They all mix with us humans. So when we go to the beach, all the lovely sitacine birds, they sit with us, you know, they eat our crumbs. But there is always danger of spillover. And very recently, well, not that recently, in past decade, we had a very interesting what we called the Australian sitasai horse story. So we had chlamydia sitasai causing outbreak in thoroughbred horses and causing fetal fall. loss. So as such, there was a huge economic impact to the stud owners, but also, we also had a novel zoonotic transmission where the veterinary practitioners or students unknowingly that

there is a chlamydia, they handled placental material and became infected with chlamydia cytosate and developed pneumonia and respiratory infection. With several of these chlamydia species, we've got wildlife, domestic livestock, and sometimes humans that can all be involved, which brings to mind, of course, One Health. Can you talk about why it is so important to consider these pathogens from a One Health perspective? Well, for example, I'll go back to the Chlamydia cytosite in horses example, because that example, I think, really through a Spanner, in the very extent. We were all like, wow, that's very unique. So to the best of my knowledge, chlamydia in horses is not very common in Europe, nor, let's say, in USA. So we really have unique one health story in Australia. So horses wildly interact with our wildlife birds,

with our wildlife parrots. Perots are infected with cytosite. We believe, and we have evidence, that spillover from bird to horse was the cause of equine infections, then we have humans who both interact directly and or indirectly with birds and with horses. So, us in research, we knew chlamydia, chytacize, zonotic potential, all the strains were clonal belonging to a known virulent lineage. But for example, the GPs, the general practitioners, in human medicine, they may have not been fully aware how common is the potential for spillover. So that's why that one health collaboration, it's very important.

And literally every chlamydia should be considered as a one health pathogen rather than, yeah, is solely contained to human, like charymothymouth, and or to koala. So it's very important that we broaden that collaboration, that we brood. and our communication, because especially in Australia, wildlife, domesticated animals and humans, they are very interactive. They are not isolated systems. Next, I was wondering if we could talk about things like land use change and climate change and how these things are affecting the prevalence and distribution of chlamydia species. Kind of a big question, but what do we know so far? I can comment on especially during droughts, koalas, they get their, all of their fluids they get from eucalyptus leaves. During droughts the trees don't hold as much water and the koalas don't get as much fluid.

So they have to come down out of their trees and they find water from water holes or from troughs that are from farmers that have used, which are encroaching on eucalyptus forest. So there's increased that interaction between your livestock and koalas, which then droughts are pulling the koalas down out of the trees, and they're moving around between them. So there's a high risk of spillover for chlamydia species between koalas, livestock. Even birds as well, birds come down and eat the feed that's for the livestock, so then they're interacting more with koalas.

So all of these climate change effects in being drought, or even floods and things like that is segregating different populations. They're all affecting the way that the animals are interacting and then as a one health, there's potential for spillover and cross-transmission of different species is increased exponentially. And obviously land use for humans is affecting koalas and devastating the populations. Yeah.

The habitat loss, I think it's always the biggest problem because if you remove the natural habitat of your wildlife, you know, they become stressed. They go search for food. They encroach the human residential areas where, as they're in point, there are dogs. They were, you know, domestic. For example, cats in Australia can cause devastation to the natural wildlife. So it is, I think it's such a complex area to have idea what is happening. with land change, land use change, as well as climate change.

What do you see as some of our biggest gaps in knowledge regarding other, perhaps lesser-known chlamydia or maybe just less talked about chlamydia across the landscape? And why is doing exploratory work investigating these host pathogen relationships? Why is that so important? Well, honestly, I think we really have a lot of knowledge gaps ahead of us. So as I said, like we are very centric in species and in host. And recently we did one of the bigger bird surveillance studies where we looked at population of wildlife birds for chlamydial species,

for prevalence and diversity. And that is where we discovered that besides sitasai and pecorum, we also have this novel emerging avian chlamydia abortos strains, in our crows, then we also saw strains that they are described in globally overseas, in water birds, some novel species. So that is when we were like, okay, well, you know, there are more hosts, more species. So who is now the next spillover host? So we have a big surveillance work that we genuinely need to do.

And it's also interesting that in Australia in particular, besides sheep and cattle, eventually one goat here and there, we still haven't looked at chicken nor pigs, that they're also one of the primary hosts for chlamydial species. And I think even with our wildlife, and Sam would probably say that besides koalas, we still haven't looked at other masupials in more depth. So koala shares habitat with other smaller mesopials like possum, bandicoot, potteroo, little wall of bees, but we still haven't done any proper and in-depth surveillance for all these hosts. And it is that is very important because if we note an emerging pathogenic or zoonotic species in this host,

that is very important for control of this infection. So we still need to do exploratory and investigative work beyond our everyday research. It goes back to the other questions, the other answers as well with, we're pushing all of these animals into confined environmental spaces where they're having to share populations that are overlapping between farm animals and birds and koalas. There's these increased risks of spillover between different species. And currently we don't know what species are even there to identify

if there is spillover. Some of these pathogens can have devastating effects we look at say chlamydia abortis in livestock and decimate farmed populations of sheep and if yeah we've already identified that there's changes in that species to be able to infect non-blossental mammals so we can see clominee abhorstrands of clemereoborus. We still don't know how that happened and what effect it's having on the avian species. and they, I mean, you know, you get into migratory birds and you can get transmission across different continents and we just have no way of being out to identify if these things are

happening and if they're having significant effects on different areas. We saw with coronavirus, it's so easy for a pandemic to get out of control and then the spread is impossible to control. And we were looking for these things. Some of these chlamydia species, we're not even looking at. So we try on the podcast sometimes when we can to end on a hopeful note. We don't always get to do that. So, but in this one, I would like to try.

So let's turn towards vaccines. For decades, people have been working on a vaccine for chlamydia. And success finally seems just around the corner with this new chlamydia pecoram vaccine that's currently in trials with koalas. Can you talk a bit about this vaccine? like what kind of vaccine it is, and what have the trials shown us so far? Yeah, definitely. So as you mentioned, we've been working on the koala, the corona vaccine for 10, I think it's 15 years now.

There's been many different. So I've got a half an hour presentation on this, so I'll try to keep the short of. So the current vaccine that we use, which has come through a lot of development, is a recombinant protein vaccine. This is using the major out of membrane protein of chlamidipacorum. There's three chlamydia picorum strains that are used in the vaccine, and we chose these strains because these are the strains that are widely spread throughout Australia. So we can use this vaccine in populations right across the country. The specific protein that we use is actually, it's not an easy protein to use.

There's not a lot of trials in other vaccines as well, in human trial vaccines using this protein because it's quite difficult to isolate. It forms hydrophobic regions, which makes it difficult to purify. So we've spent quite a lot of time working on being able to get this specific protein to a level that we can use, utilizing vaccines. The reason we've done that is highly immunogenic. We believe, at least in chrychomosis, this protein is definitive of different tropism, It's quite an important protein and its surface exposed.

So it's more likely to attract a stronger immune response during immunization. The other part to a vaccine when you're using recombin proteins is an adjuvant. We've trialed several different adjuvants. The adjuvant we use is a three-part adjuvant, which we believe is really important with our vaccine. So with koalas, we need to have a single-dose vaccine. We can't have double-dose boosters. is choirs don't come back for appointments when you tell them to.

So we need to have a single dose vaccine. So we've chosen the adjuvant that we utilize that allows us to have this single dose by forming particles within the vaccine mix. So it forms these biodegradable particles to allow the vaccine to disseminate across the koala's body. And then as these particles degrade, it exposes the antigens to the koala immune response.

You get a systemic response, which is much longer lasting. We believe it's at least two years protection in these koalas. Remembering koalas only live in the wild between five and eight years and reproductive between the ages of two and five possibly. So we don't need to have a vaccine that lasts 80, you know, the extent of a human lifespan of 80 years, we only need five years. So we've tested this out for two years.

We've got some anecdotal evidence to show that there is protection from infection out to three years, and we're planning on doing a new trial, which will go out for four years. And we believe this is all down to the adjuvant that we've chosen. We get a great immune response due to the antigen, but a systemic response that's long-lasting we believe it's due to the adjuvant that we utilize. In general, what are some of the biggest challenges in creating an effective and durable vaccine for chlamydia pecorum as well as other species of chlamydia? Yeah, in a nutshell, the infection site, so chlamydia is a majority of mucosal infection.

Mucosal vaccines are notoriously difficult to produce. You look at influenza vaccines and humans, they only last six months maximum. The only mucosal infection vaccine that has proven widely effective is the HPV vaccine. Chlamydia can transmit around the body. the range of tissues and presentations that chlamydia has with pecoramidus and cytos, it's so vary, it can affect so many different sites and have different phenotypic traits that one vaccine to clear all chlamydia infections is highly unlikely. I think there's trials that have shown with chocomitus is that the vaccine that works for ocular infections,

but not for your genital infections. And who knows what it's doing to the gastrointestinal site where you have severe complex immune interactions between bacteria and post-amine responses. I wouldn't say that there's a vaccine that's going to fix everything around the corner, if at all. But specific vaccines to fix specific problems is more likely. I guess we could also say, and we were discussing actually this, it's same just the other day,

whether it's color, whether it's livestock. So if you create a vaccine that will stop the disease, not necessarily infection, but if it can stop that infection to develop into the full disease, I think that's also one aspect that you could say that the vaccine is effective. Of course, the ultimate vaccine would be, you know, like your classic vaccine, AMO, modus operandi, stops infection. That's it. Just, you know, blocks the pathogen. But even if we achieve no disease, I think that's also a great achievement for veterinary vaccines.

And so besides potentially protecting koala populations and helping koalas to recover, what are some other impacts that this vatic? vaccine might have in terms of public health or wildlife veterinary health, like what will this be able to tell us about administering a vaccine in wildlife, which is a little bit more different than administering it to, you know, livestock? Definitely. We're breaking new ground with this. It's, as you say, it's never been done before. There's never a fact, as far as I can tell, there's not a vaccine successfully administered in wildlife. So besides all the complexities and difficulties in actually running vaccine trials, but getting a vaccine to a point where it's available for veterinarians and wildlife carers to be able to utilize is really difficult.

And we're trying to induce new policy within the Australian federal governments to allow for funding of such a vaccine. We can't go. We're not looking at a research project, but we're also not looking at a commercially viable vaccine. So this is, yeah, it's new territory. We can't, yeah, say to a company you make this and you'll make so much money because you won't make any money. And then, yeah, how do you get to the koalas? And then how do you know which koalas have had the vaccine? They don't have a health card or anything to say that they've been vaccinated. So it's incredibly difficult. We're trying to

work our way through it. Our vaccine is getting registered with the APVMA, which is the Australian veterinary therapeutics administration. It's like the TGA for animals. So we're putting together an application for that to have it registered and be available for people outside of a research project. But the funding and financing for such a vaccine is still complex. And the number of doses we need is small in comparison. We need probably, we estimate about 2,000 doses a year.

when you compare that to say COVID where we needed two billion doses a year it's yeah for manufacturers it's really small and surprisingly it's difficult to be able to produce small levels of vaccine it's many different problems which we're trying to work through and we have solved quite a lot we've we've got we've got a manufacturing partner that's willing to come on board and make the vaccine we've got access to adjuvants. We've got plans to distribute this throughout wildlife hospitals. There is frameworks

that have been developed to go out and vaccinate wild populations and use microchips to track which ones have been vaccinated and which ones haven't. And so, yeah, we are on our way. We're well down the track. There's been two years in the making so far

and we're nearly ready to submit our application. So, yeah, Yeah, this is how you get things, breaking you territory and get new things done. You have to push people outside of their comfort zones. Absolutely. Oh, it's so exciting. It seems very hopeful. So I've got one last question for you, too, before I let you go.

And that is, can you share some of your favorite pieces of chlamydia or koala trivia? Okay, I'll start. So, okay, did you know? that clomidia infect flamingos. No, I did not. Okay. And recently, by our European colleagues, they discovered two new species and belonging to a new genera within family chlamydiae.

There you go. And did you know, Erin, that another new species of chlamydia was isolated from crocodiles? What? And its termed, yes, and its name is chlamydia crocodilly. So it is remarkable. That is exactly what we said. There is a chlamydia for every host on every continent wherever you want it. You just have to look.

You just have to seek and you shall find and you shall find a lot. I think about saying, I stole mine. I was going to say something along the same lines. I could add that there are some theories that chlamydia is responsible for the mitochondria in multicellular organisms. Ooh. There's some links there. There's also some evolutionary biologists to say that that's foy.

Yeah. Thank you so much, Dr. Yulochnik and Dr. Phillips for chatting with me today and for answering all of my many, many chlamydia questions. If you would like to learn more about any of the topics we touched on today, check out this episode's post on our website, this podcast will kill you.com. We're all linked to a few papers. Also on our website are the sources for all of our episodes, transcripts, quarantini and placebo-reta recipes, our bookshop.org affiliate account, goodreads list, links to music by Bloodmobile, links to merch and Patreon, and so much more. Listen, follow, and leave us a review on Amazon Music, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

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So until then, keep washing those hands. Success starts with your drive, and American Public University is here to fuel it. With affordable tuition and over 200 flexible online programs, APU helps you gain the skills and confidence to move forward. Whether you're changing careers, starting fresh, or pursuing a lifelong passion, our programs are designed for people who never stop. You bring the fire, APU will fuel the journey. Learn more at APU.apus.edu.edu. This podcast is supported by FX's love story, John F. Kennedy Jr. and Carolyn Beset, the new limited series from executive producer Ryan Murphy.

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