Projects

The aim of WSAVA Foundation is to fund selective scientific, educational and training projects that will be delivered by clinical and laboratory specialists for the benefit of practicing veterinarians globally.

Our ultimate goal is raising the level of patient care for companion animals and public health around the World.

Current Project

WSAVA ONE HEALTH COMMITTEE
The WSAVA Foundation is a Cosponsor of the WSAVA One Health Committee along with a consortium of industry sponsors who have generously provided funding to the Committee to permit the committee to undertake a 3-year programme of work.
http://www.wsava.org/OneHealth.htm

WSAVA ONE HEALTH COMMITTEE: THE HUMAN-COMPANION ANIMAL BOND
The WSAVA One Health Committee recognizes the significance of the role of companion animals in human society and the wide ranging benefits to human health of association with pets. These interactions include the proven benefits of association with pets in childhood development, care of the ill and elderly and institutionalized populations.
The WSAVA One Health Committee will work together with the WSAVA Wellness Committee to promote this important aspect of veterinary medicine.

WSAVA ONE HEALTH COMMITTEE: COMPARATIVE AND TRANSLATIONAL MEDICINE
The WSAVA One Health Committee recognizes the value of the scientific investigation of the range of spontaneously arising canine and feline neoplastic, degenerative, immune-mediated and other diseases which mimic the homologous human diseases.

Advances in genomic technology now mean that unparalleled value can be obtained from this area of comparative medicine. The WSAVA One Health Committee promotes and endorses high quality comparative and translational research of naturally occurring disease in companion animal populations. The Committee supports research performed in a clinical patient-based setting with appropriate legal and ethical approval.

WSAVA ONE HEALTH COMMITTEE: ZOONOTIC INFECTIOUS DISEASE
The WSAVA One Health Committee believes that the greatest impact and relevance for its work lies in the area of zoonotic infectious diseases. The strength of the committee’s expertise lies in this area with experts in the major companion animal zoonotic infectious diseases and the surveillance experience of the CDC and OIE.

The committee appreciates that there are already many excellent initiatives related to key zoonotic diseases, and in particular rabies. Whilst the committee endorses and supports such initiatives, it recognizes that it does not have the resource or time to allocate to developing its own major new projects.

The committee recognizes the significant lack of co-ordinated small companion animal zoonotic disease surveillance internationally and is producing a position paper on this topic.
The committee recognizes that there is potential for the WSAVA global network to be used to rapidly disseminate information related to global disease pandemics, but more significantly for the practitioner network to be used as a conduit for infectious disease surveillance and reporting. However, in order to set up such a surveillance scheme and ensure the quality of the data, very large-scale funding would be required and this is beyond the current scope of the OHC.

The strength of the WSAVA lies in scientific education and communication and in order to conform to this strength the most relevant output from this committee will be in the provision of quality information for the global practitioner network. This will be provided via the medium of these webpages and the WSAVA One Health Facebook page.