From concepts to programs: three decades of progress for veterinary public health and animal health in Latin America and the Caribbean

ABSTRACT

The purpose of this article is twofold to review the basic rationale behind veterinary medical activities in Latin America and the Caribbean and to describe the role PAHO has played over the last three decades in promoting and helping to improve the quality of these activities. In essence, development of a strong veterinary public health program in the region has depended upon three major precepts. These are (1) Animal health is a key factor in socioeconomic development. (2) There is a critical interrelationship between human and animal health that becomes evident in veterinary public health programs. (3) Veterinary public health plays an important role in in focusing attention on communicable disease problems and in pioneering new programs in animal health and veterinary education. Clearly animal health in Latin Amarica and the Caribbean is inextricably linked to socioeconomic development. Livestock represents an important agricultural product and a major source of revenue. It is therefore essential to reduce economic losses wrought by animal diseases such as zoonoses, foot and mouth disease, hog cholera, piroplasmosis, and Newcastle disease. The resulting increased productivity and freer international trade would help alleviate the critical shortages of energy and protein that beset the world today. A key interrelationship between human and animal health relates to man's need of protein. Malnutrition, which continues to plague the populations of developing countries, was recently shown to be the indirect or direct cause of half of the deaths among children under 5 years of age in Latin America. The livestock industry is a principal tool for alleviating this problem by providing essential protein. In addition, some of the more prevalent diseases - rabies, brucellosis, tuberculosis, hydatidosis, the equine encephalitides, leptospirosis, and anthrax - are acquired directly or indirectly from animals. Given these important linkages between animal and human health, it is appropriate that national and international programs should have been instituted to promote well-being and prevent disease, capitalising on the resources of veterinary and scientific communities. In the Americas, PAHO's Special Program of Animal Health has spearheaded these pioneering efforts. That program has proved instrumental in promoting, establishing and providing technicial support for all phases of national and regional animal health activities. Numerous PAHO-supported country projects have been successfully completed, and many others are still underway, in such critical areas as veterinary aducation and development of human resources; animal disease control, epidemiology,and vaccine production; animal disease diagnostic laboratories; food production; and laboratory animal medicine. All in all, it is now evident that this Program's past and present endeavors have made a major contribution to human and animal health. But it is also true that solutions of the problems confronted partly through that program will require a contuining political commitment to provide appropriate finincial and human resources - and failure to employ sufficient resources of this kind could have a serious impact on animal health and human well-being in the Americas (Summary)