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Traditionally, zoonoses have been an area of study and service in
the WSU College of Veterinary Medicine (CVM) within the Agricultural
Animal Health Program (AAHP). Over the years, the CVM has operated
its Field Disease Investigation Unit (FDIU) in collaboration with
the Agricultural Research Center (ARC), a part of the College of
Agricultural, Human and Natural Resource Sciences (CAHNRS). This
working arrangement, which involved faculty taking joint
appointments and salaries in both colleges, led to a body of
compiled research on food safety. Based on this groundwork, the idea
arose in 1995 to create an integrated agricultural animal health
program in the CVM. The original goal, to maximize efficient use of
scarce resources, led to the idea of looking at disease control from
the basic science lab to its practical application in the field.
What has evolved is a major multidimensional program designed to
solve long-standing as well as emergent health problems of both
people and animals.
| A crucial step in this evolution was the decision to hire clusters
of faculty members who shared similar research interests in
complementary areas of expertise. The early success of these
collaborations contributed greatly to the 1999 funding of the WSU
Safe Food Initiative by the Washington State Legislature as well as
the $9.9 million National Institutes of Health grant awarded to WSU
in 2003. The NIH grant led directly to the creation of the
Zoonosis Research Unit, in the CVM, which will help serve as
front-line defense in the prevention of diseases including bovine
spongiform encephalopathy or mad cow disease. |
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The story began in 2000, when Doug Call and Chris Davies, assistant
professors in the Department of Veterinary Microbiology and
Pathology, together with Rowland Cobbold, assistant professor in the
FDIU, were hired as a faculty cluster under the SFI to investigate
issues of disease control and food safety. Call and Cobbold have
been specifically working on ways to identify and control current
and emerging livestock diseases in order to help assure a quality
product to the world market. For example, much of their work focuses
on ways to contain the ever-present E.coli 0157 (the culprit in the
early 1980s Jack in the Box outbreak), Salmonella and Listeria
bacteria in cattle. One goal is to develop a reliable test to
distinguish between species specific strains of E. coli 0157—since
it is difficult to tell whether the bacteria came from cows or
people.
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are also underway to discover how Salmonella Newport, a significant
cause of livestock loss in the Pacific Northwest, is spread and why
it persists in the environment. One reason bacteria such as
Salmonella and Listeria are so resilient is due to their
production of biofilms—a sort of micro-slime layer that is all but
impossible to remove from infected surfaces, including stainless
steel. Antibiotic resistance is another critical problem for the
livestock industry, even on organic farms where no antibiotics have
been given. New assays to help understand the on-farm dynamics of
this problem are in progress. |
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This team effort, including collaborators in the AAHP, bore great
results, garnering the $9.9 million, seven-year NIH grant which led
to the establishment of the Zoonosis Research Unit (ZRU) whose
mission is to investigate specific food- and water-borne zoonotic
diseases in Washington State. The goals of the ZRU are three fold:
- Generate proposals for the study of zoonotic agents such as
Salmonella, E.coli and Listeria infections; antibiotic resistance;
and the transmission of agents through surface irrigation water.
- Develop an emergency response plan for dealing with the
possibility of
extraordinary zoonotic events like the threat of bioterrorism or
massive national
outbreak of a disease such as avian flu.
- Seek to collaborate with other Washington state agencies
such as the Public Health Laboratory and the Department of Ecology
for ongoing surveillance of emerging diseases.
The ZRU research group, led by Dale Hancock, Professor in the FDIU,
and Tom Besser, Professor in Veterinary Microbiology and Pathology and
Coordinator of Public Health Services in the Washington Animal Disease Diagnostic
Laboratory (WADDL), was further honored to be included in the newly established
National Food- and Water-borne Diseases Integrated Research Network. The
Network is an elite group of 5 units located throughout the nation that
collaborate and integrate zoonotic research findings. “There will be much
collaboration between units within the CVM and across campus,” said Hancock. “It will
include working with our colleagues in the College of Agricultural, Human and
Natural Resources Sciences, the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, and
the USDA Animal Disease Research Unit.” *
* Excerpted from Safeguarding Our Food
Supply - Protecting Our Health - Briefing Paper Series,
Washington State University, January, 2005;
http://www.wsu.edu/university-relations/internal-communications/safeguarding-food.pdf
ZRU Home
| Revised
March 03, 2006
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