Are you a health professional? Are you interested in "One Health"?

Conservation medicine is an emerging interdisciplinary field that studies the relationship between human and animal disease and the environmental conditions that relate to disease.

The relationships between environmental factors, human and animal health are complex, global and poorly understood. These relationships are best investigated by teams that may include physicians, microbiologists, ecologists, biologists, toxicologists, epidemiologists, climate scientists and social scientists.

For example, the current human rabies outbreak in India is related to the recent Indian vulture population crash. Vultures died because anti-inflammatory drugs used to treat arthritis and other conditions in domestic animals are toxic to vultures and when vultures were no longer present to remove the dead animals, domestic dog numbers increased and the dogs are not often vaccinated against rabies.

Conventional isolated approaches to environmental protection and human and animal health examine the connections between these factors only as an exception. Such relationships are fundamental to conservation medicine, which seeks to harness the skills of a wide range of professionals to improve human, animal and environmental health.

Conservation medicine

Zoos are key institutions to study conservation medicine due to the diagnostic skills and ecological expertise available in zoos, the close relationship between humans and animals in zoos, conservation research conducted at zoos and the fact that zoos house many different species with differing disease susceptibilities.

The NZG is offering a four-day introductory accredited multidisciplinary course in conservation medicine from 21-24 February 2012. The course will introduce participants to both the concepts of conservation medicine and their practical application. It is intended to encourage and enable health practitioners to take a multidisciplinary view of health matters and disease research, and to provide them with key practical skills to facilitate field disease investigations.

The course will consist of lectures, interactive case studies and a practical session. Lecturers will be experts in their fields and drawn from both the NZG and various partner institutions. The course is open to between 10 and 20 health practitioners or researchers, with at least a Bachelor's degree, from a wide range of disciplines. Participants will be chosen to include as broad a range of disciplines as possible on the course, therefore the number of delegates will be limited per discipline based on a first come basis.

Lecturers

• Dr Thomas Nyariki - Wildlife Expert of the African Union Inter-African Bureau of Animal Resources
• Professor Chris Walzer - Research Institute of Wildlife Ecology, Vienna
• Dr Lucille Blumberg - Outbreak Response Unit, National Institute of Communicable Diseases
• Dr Brian Reilly -TUT
• Dr Michael Kock - Wildlife Conservation Society
• Dr Markus Hofmeyr - SANParks
• Drs Bartels, Dalton, Espie, Kharibe, Lane, Mbatha, Mtshali, Tordiffe - National Zoological Gardens of South Africa
• Prof. van Bogaert - WITS
• Drs Murphree and Bocchino - University of the North West
• Drs Burroughs, Geoghegan, Knobel, Myburgh, van Schalkwyk - University of Pretoria
• Dr Bengis - DAFF
• Dr Henton - IDEXX
• Dr Gerdes

Features

• Mixture of lectures, case studies and a field practical
• Multidisciplinary training
• Practical aspects of conservation medicine
• Legal, ethical, safety considerations
• Epidemiology, statistics and data and sample collection
• Sample collection and handling

Cost
R6000 per person

Enrolment
Please download the enrolment form. Enrolment closes on 30 November 2011.

Contact
For more information contact Sr Jacqui Rankin via email jacqui@nzg.ac.za or call 012 339 2830.