International One Health Day

There are innumerable examples of advances in human medicine that have led to improvements in animal health – as just one example, some of the biggest equipment used in the University of Liverpool’s animal clinics (such as MRI scanners) were originally developed for use in human hospitals.  But there are also many examples of veterinary medicine leading to improvements in human health or medicine.  In the UK, we are now safe to eat raw or undercooked eggs owing to a major programme to eliminate salmonellosis from the layer industry. The incidence of human rabies in much of East Africa has declined, owing to vaccination not of people, but of dogs.  My favourite example relates to transmissible spongiform encephalopathies. In the early 1960s members of the Foré tribe in Papua New Guinea were dying from a novel disease called Kuru (related to variant CJD). An American medic attempted transmission experiments with chimps that were not successful, leading to the conclusion that the disease was of genetic origin. The medic spoke on this in the UK and, in the audience, was a veterinarian.  The vet recognised that the characteristics of Kuru seemed identical to that of a sheep disease called scrapie, which had been shown to be transmissible. He alerted the medic, who repeated the experiments, this time successfully, and went on to get the Nobel Prize for Physiology (the medic, not the vet, of course).