News
Contents
• From the President
• WVC 2013 - Prague, Czech Republic
• Responsible use of Antimicrobials
• Introduction to the WVA Global Summit
• One Health Endorsement from Junior Doctors
• World Livestock 2011 - Food security
• President Kechrid and I.P.P. Jorna Visit Serbia
• EcoSummit 2012 - Ecological Sustainability
• FVE Seminar on antimicrobials: conclusions
• The Official Veterinarian - Public good
• Small Animal National Congress in Iran
• World Bank funds health project
• EMPRES-i
• Royal Honour for Veterinary Leadership in Animal Welfare
• Food safety head Honoured by Queen
• Canadian Veterinary Medical Association News
• Employment Opportunities
• Calendar of Events
Read the Newsletter ...
Food-borne illness risks cross borders, production types
By Greg Cima
Source:
 February 15, 2012
Dr. Lonnie J. King sees a "perfect microbial storm" in the increasingly global interactions of people, animals, and environments.
Speaking late last year at a meeting convened by the Institute of Medicine's Forum on Microbial Threats, Dr. King, dean of The Ohio State University College of Veterinary Medicine, said adaptation among pathogens, increased human susceptibility to disease, changing environments, intensification of the human-animal interface, human and animal movement across international borders, and antimicrobial resistance have increased the risk of food-borne diseases.
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Source:
 Following legislative changes, the British Veterinary Association (BVA) has updated its ‘Good Practice Guide to Handling Veterinary Waste’ for England and Wales.
Supported by the Environment Agency the Guide primarily consists of an easy to understand, quick-reference poster enabling vets to categorise and segregate veterinary waste in line with Environment Agency requirements. The poster defines the types of hazardous waste, outlines the types of containers required and sets out the appropriate classification codes.
The Guide is complemented by more detailed web guidance which incorporates useful templates to download.
BVA President Carl Padgett said:
“All businesses have a duty of care to ensure that all waste is stored and disposed of responsibly, that it is only handled or dealt with by those authorised to do so and that appropriate records are kept of all waste that is transferred or received.
“The BVA Guide has been a popular resource for the profession since we first launched it in 2008 making it considerably easier for vets to comply with Hazardous Waste Regulations. The revised poster is hopefully an incentive for practices to check if their requirements have changed and ensure they’re still up-to-date.“
You can see the hazardous waste poster and web advice here and BVA members will receive a hard copy of the poster to display in their practice.
Previously unknown disease in ruminants caused by the so-called Schmallenberg virus
Source:
 “Veterinarians – both private practitioners and officials – and farmers need to work together to fight this new challenge.
A well-functioning network of veterinary services that is nation-wide, including remote areas, is essential to detect and control known and emerging disease, such as this one.
Due to their unique position, veterinary practitioners are at the front line of new diseases and form an essential link in the chain of veterinary services: a Global Public Good”
Read FVE press release ...
One Health: Water, Animals, Food and Society
Source:
The mission of the One Health Center of Expertise is to assess and respond to global health problems arising at the human-water-animal-food interface and to design, implement, and evaluate practical, cost-effective, and sustainable solutions that focus on the foundations of health in collaboration with local partners.
Research at the One Health Center will focus on reducing the rate of disease and death resulting from malnutrition, unsafe water, and animal- and vector-borne diseases with the aim of designing, implementing and evaluating health interventions at the national, regional, community and household levels.
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Agency adopts strict conditions set out in IOM report
By R. Scott Nolen
Source:
February 15, 2012
Late last year, the National Institutes of Health froze all new grants for studies involving chimpanzees after an Institute of Medicine review found little scientific necessity for using man's closest genetic relative as a research model.
Dozens of ongoing, federally funded projects will be evaluated according to the new stringent conditions adopted by the NIH, which the IOM says are necessary to justify conducting research on chimpanzees.
Advances in alternative research tools and methods, including cell-based tests and other animal models, have made chimpanzees largely nonessential as research subjects, concluded the IOM report, issued Dec. 15, 2011.
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Source:
February 1, 2012
New studies have delved into the origins of domestic dogs and of modern European and American breeds.
Chinese researchers led a new study suggesting that domestic dogs originated from wolves in Southeast Asia, not the Middle East or Europe. The study appeared as a Nov. 23, 2011, advance online publication in the journal Heredity.
Analysis of mitochondrial DNA has suggested that wolf domestication occurred in Asia south of the Yangtze River. Previous studies involving archaeological records and analysis of single nucleotide polymorphisms in nuclear DNA suggested that wolf domestication occurred in Europe or the Middle East, but the authors of the new study in Heredity state that these data sets lack data from Asia south of the Yangtze.
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Source:
A proposed EU concession to help put an end to the 20-year hormone beef trade war with the USA and Canada was unanimously endorsed by the International Trade Committee on Thursday. The proposal, which would raise the EU import quota for beef from animals not treated with hormones, will be put to a vote by Parliament as a whole on 13 March.
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Source:
 Neuroscientists at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine have discovered how the sense of touch is wired in the skin and nervous system. The new findings, published Dec. 22 in Cell, open new doors for understanding how the brain collects and processes information from hairy skin.
"You can deflect a single hair on your arm and feel it, but how can you tell the difference between a raindrop, a light breeze or a poke of a stick?" says David Ginty, Ph.D., professor of neuroscience at Johns Hopkins. "Touch is not yes or no; it's very rich, and now we're starting to understand how all those inputs are processed."
Ginty and his colleagues study how the nervous system develops and is wired. In trying to understand how touch-responsive nerve cells develop, they set out to build new tools that enable them to look at individual nerve cells.
According to Ginty, there are more than 20 broad classes of so-called mechanosensory nerve cells in the skin -- of which only six account for light touch -- that sense everything from temperature to pain. But until now, the only way to tell one cell from another was to take electrical recordings as each type of cell generates a different current based on what it senses.
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