The task of modern veterinary medicine is not only to ensure the development of animal husbandry, but also to reduce the harm of human and animal **** disease, improve the quality of animal food (meat, eggs, dairy and aquatic products, etc.) and improve environmental health, etc., directly for the service of human health.
Veterinary clinical diagnosis and treatment of most of the expensive individual livestock or breeding stock, as well as some of the accompanying animals, ornamental animals, etc. as the main object, the general livestock are focused on the whole group prevention and treatment.
The rapid development of factory-type intensive poultry and pig farming has increased the responsibility of veterinarians in the selection of feeding sites, barn design, preparation of feed additives, environmental hygiene management and immunization program development and implementation, disease diagnosis and monitoring of immunity levels, in order to improve the health level of livestock and prevention of herd disease, including infectious diseases, parasitic diseases, poisoning and nutritional metabolic diseases, etc., which have been found in hundreds of such diseases. The number of such diseases has been found to be in the hundreds. Among them, infectious diseases are the most harmful but many have been eliminated.
As of 1986, livestock infectious diseases have been eliminated in the more developed countries in animal husbandry: Denmark 18, the United States and Japan 13, the United Kingdom 10, Australia 7, the Soviet Union and the Federal Republic of Germany 6. In China, rinderpest, which used to kill hundreds of thousands or even millions of farm cattle every year, was eradicated in 1956.
But at the same time, many new diseases have occurred, the harm is greater: viral infectious diseases (such as swine vesicular disease), accompanied by pesticides, fertilizers, and industrial waste and other serious pollution and toxicity of disease, as well as nutritional and metabolic diseases. Some of them have no effective prevention and treatment methods, some (such as metabolic diseases and nutritional deficiencies) are related to the unilateral pursuit of high yield. This is a new topic for veterinary workers.
For the early prevention of nutritional metabolic diseases, now the veterinary work not only to observe whether the herd clinical symptoms, but also to determine whether it can achieve the expected production indicators and the body metabolism is in a balanced state under certain conditions, such as blood chemistry analysis of high-yielding cattle often metabolic profiling tests to predict the nutritional metabolic disease of latent or subclinical cases, and so on.
In many European and American countries, as dogs and cats are regarded as pets and fed into the wind, dogs, cats and other accompanying animal disease diagnosis and treatment has become an important part of the business of veterinarians in these countries, which also promotes the development of small animal medical science; ornamental animals, including wildlife kept in zoos and home-bred birds and poultry, the number of which has greatly increased in recent decades; a variety of high economic value of wild animals such as foxes, minks, minks and other wild animals, the number of which has increased significantly. Wild animals such as fox, mink, sika deer, musk and so on more and more of the implementation of artificial breeding, their diseases are not only a wide variety, and the pathogen is complex, which also requires veterinary workers to carry out a lot of research work.
In addition, the cultivation of experimental animals on the veterinary work has put forward more stringent requirements, some of the test animals need to be tested with sterile animals or animals without specific pathogens, in order to, for example, related to the immune mechanism of metabolic mechanisms and pharmacology of the research experiment to draw accurate conclusions. Laboratory zoology is now an emerging sub-discipline of veterinary science.
Infectious diseases of foreign origin can cause epidemics in their own countries, resulting in significant economic losses. Such as the United States in the 1880s by foreign cattle and the introduction of bovine pneumonic disease, in the slaughter of a large number of sick cattle and sick cattle in contact with the cattle before finally extinguished; Japan by foreign purchase of breeding pigs and the introduction of porcine atrophic rhinitis and porcine mycoplasma pneumonia, spread to all parts of the country pig farms, the heavy rate of infection of 50 to 60%.
China's infectious diseases imported from abroad are not uncommon, such as the purchase of dairy cows from foreign countries in 1919, bovine pneumoconiosis brought into Shanghai; 1963 imported large white pigs, has brought in porcine atrophic rhinitis; other infectious diseases such as bovine infectious rhinotracheitis, porcine spirochete dysentery, etc. are also imported from foreign purchases of breeding animals. At the same time, domestic animal pathogens from this country may also flow abroad with the export of diseased animals. Therefore, strict import and export quarantine according to the regulations, and investigate the origin of the epidemic in order to eliminate a variety of pathogens, is one of the important tasks of veterinarians.
The main task of veterinarians in this regard is the implementation of food hygiene regulations promulgated by the state, such as meat, eggs, milk, fish and other animal foods before and after the production of various aspects of health supervision and inspection, in order to prevent the dissemination of livestock infectious disease pathogens, including human and animal **** affected by the disease germs and harm to human health.
Veterinary medicine and medicine have **** the same basic theory and treatment guidelines, many human diseases can be extremely similar to the mechanism and form of performance in some animals, this disease is called the animal model of human disease, often used in the study of human disease. For example, the study of chicken viral tumor disease and chicken Marek's disease can be used to study the occurrence of human tumors. Medical doctors and veterinarians also tend to animal disease as a model **** with the study of some surgical procedures. In addition, preventive medicine and comparative medicine has become a veterinary and medical *** with the development of the discipline, in the prevention of biological warfare, chemical warfare, atomic warfare and the development of aerospace medicine and other important significance.
At present, veterinary medicine is with many new results of the relevant disciplines are more applied to the study of livestock diseases, and move to a higher level. Genetic engineering technology applied to the development of foot-and-mouth disease, rabies and juvenile diarrhea and other diseases such as vaccine preliminary success, will open the way for the development of epidemic disease subunit seedling or synthetic peptide seedling.
The application of cell engineering technology to produce monoclonal antibodies, will make veterinary diagnosis more accurate and rapid. Electronic computers and lasers have begun to be used in veterinary medicine. Wildlife, ornamental animal disease control is an area to be developed.
With the increase in the amount of livestock and poultry air transportation, will begin to study the impact of air transportation on the physiology and pathology of livestock. At the same time, international cooperation in monitoring and control of epidemic diseases will be further strengthened. In line with the above developments, more emphasis on veterinary education and scientific research, has become the same trend in many countries ****.