The Growth and use of Veterinary Epidemiology

摘要

It is naturally difficult to say when epidemiology became a distinctive discipline in the field of medical science, such that its contribution to studies of disease was accepted in its own right, and came into routine use along with the other more established disciplines. Without doubt, as a number of commentators have identified, what we recognize as epidemiological studies have been conducted for centuries if not millennia (Rothman, 1986; Thrusfield, 1995). In the human field, large-scale epidemiological studies commenced after the Second World War, but it is really only over the last 30 years that the discipline has attracted a constant flow of research funding. In the veterinary field we probably lagged slightly behind, but probably by no more than 10 years. Certainly, veterinary epidemiology was an active discipline in the, 1970s with a number of colleagues around the world in the vanguard. One of these, Roger Morris, has recently provided, appropriately for an epidemiologist, retrospective and prospective views on this development (Morris, 1994). This review and the, paper by Dr. Woolhouse and colleagues in this issue of The VeterinaryJournal-stimulate further thoughts on the growth of veterinary epidemiology. These researchers draw attention to the use of mathematical modelling in one of the most important and practical uses of epidemiology, that of advising on the identification of optimal animal disease control schemes.