VET SCHOOL FORUM FOCUSES ON INFECTIOUS DISEASES

VET SCHOOL FORUM FOCUSES ON INFECTIOUS DISEASES

0 Comments | Roanoke Times & World News, Sep 27, 2008 | by Greg Esposito greg.esposito@roanoke.com 381-1675

A national expert on diseases that are transferable from animals to humans will speak Sunday at Virginia Tech to kick off the university’s Dean’s Forum on Infectious Diseases.

Dr. Lonnie King, senior veterinarian and director of the Centers for Disease Control’s National Center for Zoonotic, Vector-Borne and Enteric Diseases, will give the forum’s keynote address at 6:30 p.m. in Burruss Auditorium. King was the CDC’s first director of the Office of Strategy and Innovation. His speech Sunday will be titled “One Health.”

The speech is free and open to the public. A daylong symposium at the Inn at Virginia Tech will follow Monday with presentations from experts on infectious disease from universities around the country, as well as Tech. The forum is sponsored by the Virginia-Maryland Regional College of Veterinary Medicine and Tech’s College of Science.

Gerhardt Schurig, dean of the vet college, said the idea behind the forum is to encourage interdisciplinary cooperation to address the issue and increase public awareness. Experts with backgrounds in engineering, human and veterinary medicine and agriculture all can contribute to solutions, he said.

The vet school has been focusing on preventing diseases in animals through vaccines for years, Schurig said. And the recent addition of four new faculty members to focus on viruses should strengthen an area that has been a weakness of the school.

King, who was dean of the college of veterinary medicine at Michigan State University, also worked for the United States Department of Agriculture before joining the CDC
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