Veterinary roles must expand to protect public health, reports say

WASHINGTON — As veterinary medicine collides with public and wildlife health, practitioners now face new societal pressures that include recognizing and researching environmental threats and emerging disease.

Government players and scientific leaders now are beseeching DVMs to enter research and bolster the country's framework for surveilling animal health. "In a rapidly changing world" two highly publicized National National Research Council (NRC) reports recognize that animal health has "broad implications" on everything from human population to global security.

Authored by the profession's experts, the reports say that by nature, veterinary medicine's disciplinary lines are blurred. As urban sprawl intrudes further on wildlife environments, scientists note 11 of the last 12 significant human epidemics have been caused by zoonotic pathogens. Nothing implies "this trend of emerging and re-emerging zoonoses will abate," researchers say.

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Yet a DVM deficit exists in research, agriculture and government arenas, where the hodgepodge of agencies monitoring animal health triggers gaps and overlaps in disease detection and safeguarding initiatives, the reports say.

In a joint news conference, the academies' National Research Council panels confirmed the DVM shortage and critical need for a high-level centralized chief to coordinate the nation's splintered network charged with disease recognition, one study suggests.

As lead author of "Animal Health at the Crossroads: Preventing, Detecting and Diagnosing Animal Diseases," Dr. Lonnie King pushes for an inter-agency alliance and point-person to lead partnerships among the veterinarians, federal agencies, institutions and international groups that safeguard animal health.

"The United State's framework must pursue a very different path if it's successful in preventing disease," says King, director of the Office of Strategy and Innovation for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Considering the U.S. population is expected to reach 9 billion in 30 years and livestock numbers are projected to swell 50 percent by 2020, "that's just going to put more stress and strain on a system where we already know there are gaps," King adds. (See DVM Newsmakers.)

Lacking support

Intensifying that pressure are weaknesses within veterinary research divisions. The report "Critical Needs for Research in Veterinary Science" reveals the majority of agencies likely to fund veterinary studies often elect not to, leaving the United States vulnerable to zoonotic disease outbreaks and bioterrorism attacks.

The demand on veterinary medicine has been increased, says lead author James Womack, PhD, a professor at Texas A&M's Department of Veterinary Pathobiology and Faculty of Genetics. Failing to detect disease could have "devastating effects on human and animal welfare," he says.

While the National Institutes of Health (NIH) remains the leader of all research grants to veterinary institutions, awarding $186 million in 2003, all medical disciplines received nearly $2 billion that same year. Veterinary sciences accounted for less than 1 percent of all NIH awards and dollars from 1993 to 2003, the report says.

The United States Department of Agriculture (USDA), by comparison, funds veterinary medical research via grants far less. With a mission to provide federal and national leadership on food, agriculture and natural resources, the agency appropriated $152,445 to in-house animal research in 2003.

In addition to lacking resources, numbers of USDA veterinary medical officers (VMO) have declined causing a "crisis" that reflects "both a difficulty in recruitment and retention of DVMs with PhD degrees," the report says. Although competitive pay and student loan reimbursement now exist at USDA, qualified VMO candidates are needed in pathology, infectious diseases, laboratory animal medicine and microbiology, the report says.

Facilities shortages and deficiencies also are illustrated. According to the report, the government is spending $455 million on a state-of-the-art facility in Ames, Iowa, designed to merge the National Veterinary Services Laboratories, Center for Veterinary Biologics and National Animal Disease Center. However, this project does not include space for new animal research programs in livestock and poultry health, the report says. At the same time, facilities built in the 1960s and 1970s "urgently" need upgrades, including the National Animal Disease Center, Southeast Poultry Research Laboratory, Plum Island Animal Disease Center, Avian Disease and Oncology Laboratory, and Arthropod-Borne Animal Disease Research Laboratory, the report adds.

"Federal legislative and procurement processes have created long delays in renovation or replacement of critical facilities while funding for new research projects have moved faster," the report says.

Research culture

Both studies mark a "declining interest" in areas of food animal medicine and research among veterinary students. While Womack's report identifies needs for a "strong workforce of veterinary researchers," King's group proposes federal and institutional agencies as well as the American Veterinary Medical Association (AVMA) encourage such DVM careers.

"There are insufficient graduates to meet the needs in number of major and distinct fields of veterinary medicine dealing with various species of food animals, rural practice, ecosystem health, public health, the many dimensions of the food system and biomedical science," the report says.

Womack's work goes further to suggest requiring educational recruitment and programming changes to enhance the "veterinary research culture" by adding combined DVM/PhD paths and integrating basic science into clinical curricula. It recommends AVMA's Council on Education, charged with college accreditation, strengthen its guidelines for assessing research opportunities for veterinary students.

"Research scientists in training should be made aware of national problems in animal health and welfare, be given the opportunity to incorporate cutting-edge science into experimental design and develop programs of high quality that compete nationally with other disciplines of science," the report says.

Innovation surge

If change fails, veterinary medicine will miss "unparalleled opportunities" in biomedicine. Both reports contain a series of recommendations to improve and strengthen the nation's research agenda and animal health structure (See Table 1 and Table 2).

Table 1. Proposals for beefing up research and its related workforce

Their goals: to protect the public, elevate the profession and meet the needs of food safety. But while there are plenty of ideas, there are just as many hurdles, King says.

Table 2. Recommendations for strengthening the U.S. animal health framework

"The world has changed dramatically; animal agriculture in particular finds itself at a real crossroads," he says. "There's a lack of federal oversight at a time when there's a convergence of human and animal medicine. This is a very special time in the history of animal health."