Canary Database

Check out the Canary Database - Animals as Sentinels of Human Environmental Health Hazards. This database is produced by Yale University Occupational and Environmental Medicine at the Yale School of Medicine.

The database contains studies in the biomedical literature that explore the use of wildlife, domestic, and companion animals as "sentinels" for the effects of chemical, biological, and physical hazards in the environment that may be a risk to human health.

This compilation of curated peer-reviewed research articles related to the use of animals as sentinels of human health hazards also contains information added by trained curators in addition to bibliographic records from MEDLINE and other well-known databases.

For each study, curators add information about animal species, exposures, health effects, location, and whether the study includes data providing evidence linking animal sentinel events to human health risk in the following ways:

• Exposure-effect relationships in the animal
• Shared exposures between human and non-human animals
• Interspecies susceptibility
• Linkage between animal and human health outcomes
• Gene sequence information

Use the Canary Database to:

• Find out whether a cause and effect relationship between an environmental hazard and a health outcome has been studied in animal populations
• Find out what is known about a particular disease reservoir for an infectious agent
• Find out how investigators have used different study methodologies
• Identify knowledge gaps related to animal sentinel health events

The project team is labelling it 'Public Beta' right now and encourages comments.