This news item is about: A new paper in the Journal of Wildlife Diseases describes the first documented case of canine distemper virus in a wild Amur leopard after a two year-old female was found on the side of the road exhibiting severe neurological symptoms. Amur leopards are critically endangered, with only 80 estimated left in the wild. Most of the population lives in the Land of the Leopard National Park in eastern Russia, where the two year-old female was originally found in 2015. “As carnivore numbers decline, they face a greater risk from chance events like outbreaks of disease,” said Martin Gilbert, a Wildlife Health Cornell carnivore specialist at the Cornell University College of Veterinary Medicine and joint lead author on the new paper.