Animal Health - Introduction

Veterinary medicine has progressed in leaps and bounds over recent years.

Around 90% of the medicines used to treat animals were first developed for people [Corbis].

New methods have been developed to diagnose accurately - and then surgically or medically treat - most of the common diseases affecting livestock and pet animals. So animals under human care are potentially able to enjoy longer and healthier lives than ever before. But veterinary researchers can never afford to relax – the patterns of diseases in all species will change with time as new conditions appear and old problems re-emerge – like BSE in 1987 and foot-and-mouth disease in 2001.

Are there links between human and veterinary medicine? Just as humans benefit from research carried out on laboratory animals, farm and pet animals profit from the results of clinical trials conducted in humans. Indeed, at least 80 different drugs of many different types - analgesics, anaesthetics, antibiotics etc – that are routinely used by vets were originally spin offs from human medical research.

These similarities in treatment are really not surprising because the underlying disease processes are often exactly the same. It is reckoned that at least 350 diseases recorded in animals have a human equivalent and at least 100 organisms that cause parasitic diseases in livestock or pets are equally at home in humans.

But it is risky to assume that what happens in different species will always be the same. A drug that is effective in one species can be toxic in another and these differences can only be revealed by careful testing.

There are some treatments that are used exclusively in veterinary medicine. Often these involve the drugs or vaccines used against parasitic diseases that only affect a particular animal species. But some drugs are effective against a wide range of parasites. Ivermectin is one of the most important drugs used in veterinary medicine used against internal (worms) and external (flees and lice) parasites in many different species. While it was originally developed for animal use it has since been shown to work against the nematode worms responsible for onchocerciasis (river blindness) a condition affecting millions of people in the developing world.