Just in case you missed it!

Hey everyone,
I am posting the article from the Coloradoan about the new workforce expansion act.
Try and find the mistakes regarding students. :)



HANDS-ON: Marci Stille, a veterinarian technician at Colorado State University Veterinary Teaching Hospital, hands a baby alpaca to senior vet student Aleanore Robinson on Wednesday. Most veterinarians specialize in small-animal care.

Vets needed to combat health threats
Bill would encourage public health research

By PAT FERRIER
PatFerrier@coloradoan.com
and NIKOLAUS OLSEN
NikOlsen@coloradoan.com

Many diseases never before seen in the United States are now threatening our shores.

Bioterrorism continues to pose risks to our food and water supplies.

Identifying and understanding the mysteries of diseases that jump from animals to humans and threaten millions of people might depend on teams of investigators who understand more than just the human body.

It will take medical doctors, public health workers and those trained to care for your cat and dog working together to combat threats - SARS, monkey pox, West Nile virus, anthrax, avian influenza and more - that most often start with animals and spread to people, say public health officials.

Yet the number of veterinarians trained in public health is few.

Of the country's 64,867 vets registered with the American Veterinary Medical Association at the end of 2004, only about 1,500 - just more than 2 percent - are listed in public health and preventive medicine.

An additional 2,400 vets work in 15 federal agencies, but 50 percent of them are getting ready to retire, according to the AVMA. And at Colorado's only vet school, about 75 percent of students would rather go into private practice than public health, said Lance Perryman, dean of the College of Veterinary Medicine and Biomedical Sciences at Colorado State University.

That's despite the $52 million CSU's veterinary college spent on research addressing public health issues such as infectious diseases, environmental toxicology issues and responses to potential foreign animal diseases that might be introduced into this country, Perryman said.

Changing the ratio of private practice to public health specialists means changing the way vet schools approach public health, said a former CSU dean.

"There's a great disconnect between what vets are doing in the world of public health and what goes on in vet schools," said Frederick A. Murphy, a professor at the School of Veterinary Medicine and Medicine at the University of California-Davis and associate dean at CSU's vet school from 1978 to 1983.

Murphy is among those leading the charge for more veterinarians to be trained in public health.

"You have to know what's going on in an animal and how the disease is transmitted," he said. "With something like West Nile virus, you have to know a lot about what's going on in the bird, mosquitoes and humans."

West Nile - first identified by a veterinarian at the Bronx Zoo who linked the death of several crows with deaths of New York residents - infected 546 Larimer County residents and killed 63 Coloradans in 2003, when the state was at the epicenter of the outbreak.

Bill aims to fix the problem

A bill introduced last week in Congress by former veterinarian Sen. Wayne Allard, a graduate of CSU's vet school, calls for $1.5 billion during the next 10 years to expand the size of vet schools and increase the number of vets trained in public health and biomedical research.

For the purpose of Allard's bill, public health is defined as areas such as bioterrorism and emergency preparedness, environmental health, food safety and security, regulatory medicine, diagnostic laboratory medicine and biomedical research.

"If we're going to combat these diseases, vets are the people we need in these jobs," said Melanie Fuller, deputy legislative assistant to the Colorado Republican.

Gina Henriksen, a fourth-year veterinary medicine student, said she almost picked public health as an undergraduate major. "I like the detective work of figuring out how a disease spreads out and how it got started."

She said she would have been interested in a public health/veterinary medicine major had it been available.

Lauren Afsahi, a third-year veterinary student, said she also would have been interested in a combined program.

"I would definitely be interested in going into public health. I think it is important for the public to know how these diseases are transferred from animals."

Failure to deal now with public health threats spread by animals could cost well beyond the $1.5 billion in Allard's bill if there were an outbreak of diseases such as SARS or foot-and-mouth disease, Fuller said. "It seems silly not to be well-prepared for it," she said.

Hope alone that such an outbreak would not play out in the United States will not safeguard animal health, the nation's food supply, public health or the U.S. economy against intentional or accidental bio- and agri-terrorism, the AVMA wrote in a statement supporting Allard's bill.

"An ample supply of well-trained veterinarians will be needed ... first responders in cases like these ... to help ensure the health of America's animals and people and the safety of its food supply," the statement said.

If Allard's bill is approved, CSU plans to compete for grant money to expand and renovate its facilities and add six new seats to its veterinary class.

CSU - which offers some dual degrees in veterinary medicine and disciplines such as microbiology - is ahead of most vet schools, Murphy said.

It already leads the nation's 27 vet schools in funding from the National Institutes of Health: $34 million. All of that is used to look at how "what we learn in animals can be used in human health," said CSU's Perryman.

CSU has performed more than 85,000 tests on cattle for the presence of bovine spongiform encephalopathy - also known as mad cow disease - through a partnership with the U.S. Department of Agriculture.

And it's involved in rabies surveillance, detection and prevention of West Nile virus, and testing for chronic wasting disease, Perryman said. While mad cow disease has sickened humans with Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, chronic wasting disease has not crossed the species barrier into humans.

Perryman, who supports Allard's bill, said CSU wants to "implement a strategy to attract new vet students committed to public health careers." That could include expanding and adding dual degree programs in veterinary medicine and public health.

"It would enable us to offer degrees where students are skilled and instantly ready to enter the job market as public health officials," he said.

The principles of animal and human medicine are the same, Perryman said. "We just happen to focus on every species other than humans."

David White, who got his doctor of veterinary medicine and a doctorate in microbiology from CSU in 2000, is at the forefront of studying zoonotic diseases - those spread from animals to humans.

White, 34, is one of 82 veterinarians working for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Nina Marano, associate director for Veterinary Medicine at the CDC, said veterinarians there are working on diseases such as Marburg virus in Angola, bioterrorism threats and rapid response, parasitic diseases like avian influenza, anthrax, and many diseases of which most people have never heard.

White said he started out wanting to go into private practice but got hooked on research into zoonotic diseases.

The combined program added about 3½ years to his studies and a considerable amount of debt.

"But this is where I can really make a difference and do so very quickly," he said, referring to the CDC, where he works in the highest-level containment lab, the place where workers dress in space-like suits to avoid contamination.

White calls it his dream job, though it's in Atlanta and not his native Colorado.

"I'm doing high-impact basic research that I've always wanted to do. My medical background provides background that other researchers don't have."

The CDC has long acknowledged that many emerging public health threats start with animals.

With only 82 veterinarians out of 9,000 CDC employees, the number "is not enough," Marano said.

She blames both the veterinarian schools and society. "The only model most students see that causes them to want to become vets are small-animal practitioners" - the vets who care for your cat, dog, horse, bird or even lizard, Marano said.

In this interconnected world and global marketplace, about 75 percent of emerging zoonotic diseases are new ones "we are discovering for the first time or coming to new parts of the world," Marano said.

White, for example, is working on the Lassa fever virus and other viral hemorrhagic fevers spread by rodents.

While Lassa fever, prevalent in Nigeria, might sound like a disease confined to far-off shores, a New Jersey man was diagnosed with the sometimes fatal disease last year.

He brought it home after traveling to Nigeria.

Fortunately, White said, the man was quarantined and treated early, and the disease did not spread.

The case demonstrates the ease with which diseases once contained to a geographic area can spread worldwide by just a handful of travelers, White said.

In Larimer County, health officials are particularly concerned about the possibility that avian influenza, or bird flu, will come over from Asia.

The virus, which can spread to humans, has led to more than 50 deaths and the culling of 2 million birds, according to news reports.

Officials fear a strain will come to the United States and spread before they are able to contain it, leading to a pandemic that could kill thousands or more, said Dr. Adrienne LeBailly, director of the Larimer County health department.

Indonesian scientists have found a pig infected with bird flu. Pigs can act as mixing vessels, LeBailly said, meaning they can be infected by a human virus and bird virus, resulting in a new strain that can infect humans efficiently.

"Whether there's an epidemic in Asia or something else that arises somewhere else, there will be a new strain of flu caused by a bird gene that no one has seen before," LeBailly said.

She also praised the work veterinarians do on behalf of public health.

While Northern Colorado has not seen an increase in the number of veterinarians going into public health, it is a trend throughout the nation, she said.

Like White, most of the veterinarians at the CDC also have advanced training in public health, Marano said.

Attracting more vets to the field, White said, will take a combination of more educational support, generating good jobs and a funding mechanism to create labs that allow for high-impact research.

One such lab is already up and running in Fort Collins.

The CDC in August broke ground on an $80 million, 155,000-square-foot facility in Fort Collins to study vector-borne diseases, including West Nile and bioterrorism threats.

CSU also started construction in November on a 34,000-square-foot facility near the new CDC lab. The university got $22.1 million from the NIH to expand its infectious disease research. The new lab will work in conjunction with CSU's Rocky Mountain Institute for Biosecurity.

Allard's bill is a start in training more specialized veterinarians, AVMA President Bonnie Beaver said in a statement.

"The present shortage of veterinarians in public practice areas endangers the public health system in the United States," Beaver said. "We don't want to look back at this opportunity and say 'We should have taken action.'"