The Canary Database

Canary Database (1970 - present)     Save to del.icio.us

The Canary Database is an index of peer-reviewed research articles related to the topic of animals as sentinels of human health hazards. It includes studies of wild, domestic, and companion animals where either the exposure or the health effect could be considered potentially relevant to human health. For each study, curators add information about animal species, exposures, health effects, location, and whether the study includes data providing evidence linking animal events to human health risk. 

Sentinel animals are species that can be early indicators of human health hazards. Canaries, for example, were used by miners to warn of high carbon monoxide and other gas levels in mines. The birds showed the effects of the dangerous gases before humans noticed them, and were an "early warning system" in the days before electronic sensors. More recently, deaths in the wild bird population were used to help track the spread of the West Nile virus in the United States.

The Canary Database is a project of the Yale University Occupational and Environmental Medicine Program at the Yale University School of Medicine and the USGS National Wildlife Health Center, and is supported in part with a grant from the National Library of Medicine.

The team's experts review a suite of regularly-run sophisticated searches and add the most relevant articles to the database according to the criteria and approach described at http://canarydatabase.org/about/classification_protocol.