Infectious Diseases Of Mice And Rats

This new editionâ€"a must for all researchers who use these lab animalsâ€"provides practical suggestions for breeding, keeping, and identifying pathogen-free laboratory rodents. It contains three informative sections. The first, Principles of Rodent Disease Prevention, summarizes methods for eliminating infectious agents. It offers information on pathogen terminology; pathogen status of rodents; and breeding, transporting, isolating, testing, and diagnosing rodents. The second section, Individual Disease Agents and Their Effects on Research, describes the diagnosis and control of each infectious agent, and the last section, Diagnostic Indexes: Clinical Signs, Pathology, and Research Complications, contains informative tables covering all the diseases listed in the volume, arranged to help in the diagnosis of infected animals.

This companion to Infectious Diseases of Mice and Rats makes practical information on rodent diseases readily accessible to researchers. This volume parallels the three parts of the main volume. Part I, Principles of Rodent Disease Prevention, briefly examines the requirements for maintaining pathogen-free rodents, factors in designing health surveillance programs, and other laboratory management issues. Part II, Disease Agents, is an easy-to-use reference section, listing diagnosis and control methods, the potential for interference with research, and other factors for disease agents ranging from adenoviruses to tapeworms. It covers bacteria, viruses, fungi and common ectoparasites, and endoparasites. Part III, Diagnostic Indexes, presents alphabetical listings of clinical signs, pathology, and research complications and lists infectious agents that might be responsible for each.

US/Japan meetings on laboratory animal science have been held virtually every year since 1980 under the US/Japan Cooperative Program on Science and Technology. Over the years these meetings have resulted in a number of important documents including the Manual of Microbiologic Monitoring of Laboratory Animals published in 1994 and the article Establishment and Preservation of Reference Inbred Strains of Rats for General Purposes. In addition to these publications, the meetings have been instrumental in increasing awareness of the need for microbiologic monitoring of laboratory rodents and the need for genetic definition and monitoring of mice and rats. In cooperation with the Comparative Medicine section of NCRR/NIH, the ILAR Council and staff are pleased to become the host for this important annual meeting and look forward to participating in future meetings. The support and sponsorship of NCRR (P40 RR 11611) in the United States and the Central Institute for Experimental Animals in Japan are gratefully acknowledged. Bringing together the leading scientists in the field of laboratory animal care has resulted in increased understanding of American and Japanese approaches to laboratory animal science and should continue to strengthen efforts to harmonize approaches aimed at resolving common challenges in the use of animal models for biomedical research and testing. This effort to improve understanding and cooperation between Japan and the United States should also be useful in developing similar interaction with other regions of the world including Europe, Australia, and Southeast Asia.

When Rats, Lice and History appeared in 1935, Hans Zinsser was a highly regarded Harvard biologist who had never written about historical events. Although he had published under a pseudonym, virtually all of his previous writings had dealt with infections and immunity and had appeared either in medical and scientific journals or in book format. Today he is best remembered as the author of Rats, Lice, and History, which gone through multiple editions and remains a masterpiece of science writing for a general readership. To Zinsser, scientific research was high adventure and the investigation of infectious disease, a field of battle. Yet at the same time he maintained a love of literature and philosophy. His goal in Rats, Lice and History was to bring science, philosophy, and literature together to establish the importance of disease, and especially epidemic infectious disease, as a major force in human affairs. Zinsser cast his work as the "biography" of a disease. In his view, infectious disease simply represented an attempt of a living organism to survive. From a human perspective, an invading pathogen was abnormal; from the perspective of the pathogen it was perfectly normal. This book is devoted to a discussion of the biology of typhus and history of typhus fever in human affairs. Zinsser begins by pointing out that the louse was the constant companion of human beings. Under certain conditions–to wash or to change clothing–lice proliferated. The typhus pathogen was transmitted by rat fleas to human beings, who then transmitted it to other humans and in some strains from human to human. Rats, Lice and History is a tour de force. It combines Zinsser's expertise in biology with his broad knowledge of the humanities

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