David Waltner-Toews OC (born 1948 in Winnipeg, Manitoba) [1] is a Canadian epidemiologist, essayist, poet, fiction writer, veterinarian, and a specialist in the epidemiology of food and waterborne diseases, zoonoses and ecosystem health. He is best known for his work on animal and human infectious diseases in relation to complexity. He lives in Kitchener, Ontario. [2]
Waltner-Toews was born in 1948 in Winnipeg, Manitoba. [3] He attended the United College (University of Winnipeg) and finished his Bachelor of Arts degree at Goshen College in 1971. He received a Doctor of Veterinary Medicine from the Western College of Veterinary Medicine at the University of Saskatchewan in 1978 and a PhD in Epidemiology at the University of Guelph in 1985. [4]
A University Professor Emeritus in the Department of Population Medicine at the University of Guelph, [5] he is the founding president of Veterinarians without Borders/ Vétérinaires sans Frontières - Canada, [6] founding president of the Network for Ecosystem Sustainability and Health., [7] and one of the founding members of the Community of Practice for Ecosystem Approaches to Health – Canada. [8]
Besides about 100 peer-reviewed scholarly papers and a textbook (Ecosystem Sustainability and Health: a practical approach, Cambridge, 2004), he has published half a dozen books of poetry, a collection of poems and recipes, an award-winning collection of short stories (One Foot in Heaven), a murder mystery (Fear of Landing) and a book about the natural history of diseases people get from animals (The Chickens Fight Back: Pandemic Panics and Deadly Diseases that Jump from Animals to Humans). In 2011 he collaborated with artist Diane Maclean on her exhibition Bird at Killhope North of England Lead Mining Museum, contributing a new poem, The Love Song of the Javanese Singing Cock [9]
Waltner-Toews is best known for his initiatives to integrate human, animal, and ecosystem health in research, practice and teaching. [10] [11] [12] This work, bridging natural sciences, humanities, and social sciences, has drawn considerably on the ideas of post-normal science, as developed by Silvio Funtowicz and Jerome Ravetz. He has been instrumental in the development of ecohealth teaching and training manuals for North America and Europe as well as Asia .
Coprophagia or coprophagy is the consumption of feces. The word is derived from the Ancient Greek κόπρος kópros "feces" and φαγεῖν phageîn "to eat". Coprophagy refers to many kinds of feces-eating, including eating feces of other species (heterospecifics), of other individuals (allocoprophagy), or one's own (autocoprophagy) – those once deposited or taken directly from the anus.
Veterinary medicine is the branch of medicine that deals with the prevention, management, diagnosis, and treatment of disease, disorder, and injury in non-human animals. The scope of veterinary medicine is wide, covering all animal species, both domesticated and wild, with a wide range of conditions that can affect different species.
Agroecology is an academic discipline that studies ecological processes applied to agricultural production systems. Bringing ecological principles to bear can suggest new management approaches in agroecosystems. The term can refer to a science, a movement, or an agricultural practice. Agroecologists study a variety of agroecosystems. The field of agroecology is not associated with any one particular method of farming, whether it be organic, regenerative, integrated, or industrial, intensive or extensive, although some use the name specifically for alternative agriculture.
A veterinarian (vet) is a medical professional who practices veterinary medicine. They manage a wide range of health conditions and injuries in non-human animals. Along with this, veterinarians also play a role in animal reproduction, health management, conservation, husbandry and breeding and preventive medicine like nutrition, vaccination and parasitic control as well as biosecurity and zoonotic disease surveillance and prevention.
The New York State College of Veterinary Medicine at Cornell University is a college of veterinary medicine at Cornell University, in Ithaca, New York. It was founded in 1894. It is the first statutory college of the State University of New York (SUNY) system.
Health ecology is an emerging field that studies the impact of ecosystems on human health. It examines alterations in the biological, physical, social, and economic environments to understand how these changes affect mental and physical human health. Health ecology focuses on a transdisciplinary approach to understanding all the factors which influence an individual's physiological, social, and emotional well-being.
The Faculty of Veterinary Medicine at Université de Montréal is one of five veterinary medical schools in Canada. It is the only French-language veterinary college in North America. The faculty is part of the Université de Montréal and is located in Saint-Hyacinthe, Quebec near Montreal.
James J. Kay was an ecological scientist and policy-maker. He was a respected physicist best known for his theoretical work on complexity and thermodynamics.
The Animal Health Trust (AHT) was a large national independent charity in the United Kingdom, employing 200 scientists, veterinarians and support workers. Its objectives were to study and cure diseases in pets, and research and postgraduate education in veterinary medicine. It was founded in 1942 by WR Wooldridge, and was awarded a Royal Charter on 29 July 1963. Elizabeth II was the charity's patron from 1959 until the end of 2016, and the Princess Royal was its president. Based in Newmarket in Suffolk, it was a registered charity under English law and received no government funding. Following fundraising issues exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic, the charity entered liquidation on 31 July 2020.
One Health is an approach calling for "the collaborative efforts of multiple disciplines working locally, nationally, and globally, to attain optimal health for people, animals and our environment", as defined by the One Health Initiative Task Force (OHITF). It developed in response to evidence of the spreading of zoonotic diseases between species and increasing awareness of "the interdependence of human and animal health and ecological change". In this viewpoint, public health is no longer seen in purely human terms. Due to a shared environment and highly conserved physiology, animals and humans not only suffer from the same zoonotic diseases but can also be treated by either structurally related or identical drugs. For this reason, special care must be taken to avoid unnecessary or over-treatment of zoonotic diseases, particularly in the context of drug resistance in infectious microbes.
Brian Derek Perry, OBE is a British veterinary surgeon and epidemiologist renowned for the integration of veterinary epidemiology and agricultural economics, as a tool for disease control policy and strategy development, and specialised in international agricultural development. He is an Honorary Professor at the University of Edinburgh, a Visiting Professor at the Nuffield Department of Clinical Medicine, University of Oxford.
Miguel Ángel J. Márquez Ruiz, is a Mexican veterinarian with over 50 years of professional practice, who has received international recognition for his contributions to veterinary medicine. He teaches at the Faculty of Veterinary Medicine of the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM) and has carried out intensive work through the years in the areas of clinical pathology, virology, immunology and avian epidemiology.
A bacteriologist is a microbiologist, or similarly trained professional, in bacteriology— a subdivision of microbiology that studies bacteria, typically pathogenic ones. Bacteriologists are interested in studying and learning about bacteria, as well as using their skills in clinical settings. This includes investigating properties of bacteria such as morphology, ecology, genetics and biochemistry, phylogenetics, genomics and many other areas related to bacteria like disease diagnostic testing. Alongside human and animal healthcare providers, they may carry out various functions as medical scientists, veterinary scientists, pathologists, or diagnostic technicians in locations like clinics, blood banks, hospitals, laboratories and animal hospitals. Bacteriologists working in public health or biomedical research help develop vaccines for public use as well as public health guidelines for restaurants and businesses.
Veterinary education in France is ensured by four specialised grandes écoles, the veterinary schools, located in Lyon, Maisons-Alfort, Nantes and Toulouse. The studies last at least seven years after the baccalauréat and end with an exertion thesis giving the right to the state diploma of veterinary physician.
The Canadian Veterinary Medical Association, founded in 1876, provides leadership on national veterinary issues, advocates for animal welfare, and works to encourage life balance in veterinary professionals.
Jonna Ann Keener Mazet is an American epidemiologist and Executive Director of the University of California, Davis One Health Institute. Recognized for her innovative and holistic approach to emerging environmental and global health threats, she is an elected member of the National Academy of Medicine and a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. Mazet is a professor of Epidemiology and Disease Ecology at the UC Davis School of Veterinary Medicine, where she focuses on global health problem solving, especially for emerging infectious disease and conservation challenges.
Kay Mehren is an American-Canadian veterinarian, who is the former senior veterinarian of the Toronto Zoo. She can be seen in the television series Zoo Diaries.
Nina-Marie Lister is Professor and Graduate Director of the School of Urban and Regional Planning at Toronto Metropolitan University, where she also leads the Ecological Design Lab. In 2021, she was appointed a Senior Fellow of Massey College. From 2010 to 2014, she was a Visiting associate professor of landscape architecture and urban planning at Harvard Graduate School of Design. Her career has spanned private and public-sector work, integrating ecological science with planning and design. As both a researcher and a practitioner, she is founding principal of PLANDFORM, a creative design practice. Lister's work focuses on the intersection of landscape infrastructure and ecological processes in metropolitan areas.
David Hayman is a New Zealand-based epizootic epidemiologist and disease ecologist whose general multi-disciplinary work focuses on the maintenance of infectious diseases within their hosts and the process of emergence and transmission to humans specifically related to bats. He has gathered data on the relationship between ecological degradation due to anthropogenic actions, and increased pathogen emergence in humans and animals. During COVID-19 he was involved as an expert in several international collaborations, some convened by the World Health Organization, and was a regular commentator in the New Zealand media about the country's response to the pandemic. He has had lead roles in research organisations at Massey University and Te Pūnaha Matatini and was the recipient of the 2017 Rutherford Discovery Fellowship Award. Since 2014 Hayman has been a professor at Massey University.
A. Alonso Aguirre is an American veterinarian, wildlife biologist, academic and researcher. He is Professor and Chair of the Department of Environmental Science and Policy, College of Science, and he also chairs the university Institutional Animal Care and Use Committee (IACUC) at George Mason University.
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