Tropical Veterinary Medicine

This volume covers many aspects of major infectious diseases, including epidemiology, disease surveillance, laboratory medicine, treatment and control. In addition to major papers in each of the areas of tick-borne diseases, arboviruses and epidemics, epidemiology, economics and animal health informatics, rabies, and chemotherapeutic and immunomodulation treatment strategies, there are shorter presentations on a variety of topics.

These papers from the IVth Biennial Meeting of the Society for Tropical Veterinary Medicine show the importance of molecular tools in epidemiology and explain how these applications define the evolutionary history of organisms and their relationship to other organisms. They look for differences between attenuated vaccine strains and virulent field strains, or from strains from different hosts. They also study the dynamics of disease transmission in a population.

The next century has been characterized by The Economist magazine as a dangerous one, and while it is impossible to completely predict the implications of the myriad changes associated with the new world order on the emergence, transmission and control of tropical diseases, they cannot be ignored. Despite improved technology utilizing diagnostic tests and vaccines, the international movement of live animals and the complexity of food trading patterns is increasing the risk of emerging diseases for both animals and humans. Animal pathogens continue to establish new niches and undergo genetic mutation. This volume speaks to these problems in papers that address issues of world trade and disease control; epidemiology, parasitology and microbiology of emerging diseases; and technology, vaccines, pharmaceuticals, quarantine, and regulatory control and communication as tools of control and prevention.