Studying animal diseases to alert humans.

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Veterinarians can alert officials of diseases

 

By Jessica Bernstein-Wax MCCLATCHY WASHINGTON BUREAUContra Costa Times

 

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http://www.contracostatimes.com/health/ci_6381592?nclick_check=1

 

 

WASHINGTON -- The nation's top public health official on Saturday urged veterinarians to work more closely with human health researchers to curb contagious diseases.

 

"Thirteen out of the last 14 new infectious diseases that have affected people have arisen from animals," said Dr. Julie Gerberding, director of the Atlanta-based federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. "We need a health system that can do fast science, fast detection ... fast and effective communication, and a very, very important piece of this fast system is the alert veterinarian," she told the American Veterinary Medical Association's annual convention.

Because animals share our food and water supply and have greater contact with the elements, their sicknesses can provide an early alert to environmental problems, human disease and even bioterrorist attacks.

Veterinarians and public health doctors know that, but they're just beginning to work together, according to Gerberding.

"Between West Nile virus and influenza (bird flu), the veterinarians and the human epidemiologists have been much more connected," she said. Had specialists in animal and human disease collaborated right off the bat when West Nile first appeared in the United States during the summer of 1999, she added, the virus might have been identified faster. [What about the use of animal serum in vaccines Ma'am? - Jagannath]

 

Instead, animal and human pathologists carried out separate investigations into a rash of sick people and birds infected by West Nile, which is transmitted by mosquitoes.

In a more recent animal-human health interaction, pet food contaminants that killed a small number of animals moved rapidly into the human food chain. Although nobody died, the need for collaboration between vets and public health doctors was again clear and urgent.

"We're in a situation now where we're talking about health teams of physicians and veterinarians and nurses," said Leon Thacker, director of the Animal Disease Diagnostic Laboratory at Purdue University in Indiana.

"If one of these foreign diseases gets into the country, the effect that it has is directly proportional to the amount of time it takes us to find it," he warned. What if a “dirty bomb” exploded over a large segment of U.S.population that simultaneously exposed citizens to Hepatitis B,Hepatitis A, tetanus, pertussis, diphtheria, three strains of polio viruses, three strains of influenza, measles, mumps, and rubella viruses, two types of meningitis, four strains of herpes viruses, the chickenpox virus, 7 strains of Streptococcus bacteria, and four strainsof rotavirus.

• We would declare a national emergency.• It would be an “extreme act of BIOTERRORISM• The public outcry would be immense and our government would react accordingly.

And yet, those are the very organisms we inject into our babies and our small children in multiple doses, with immature, underdeveloped immunesystems, many at the same time with vaccines.

But instead of bioterrorism, we call it “protection.” Reflect on that irony.- Dr Sheri Tenpenny, MD

 

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