Veterinary Public Health stands between human and animal medicine. It indicates how the environment affects the animal and the people even as more people share thesame environment with the animals. With the emergence of Ebola and other diseases from animals, this became accentuated. This is a relatively young field of medicine that is evolving. There were no aquatic medicine before, but more people continue to create fish ponds within their dwellings. It is wrongly assumed that there is no need paying attention to the effect of environmental pollution and climate change, which is not immediate. However, the effect of negligence is hardly immediate. Renal failure does not just happen in one day. There is the need to explore the field more and sponsor research on epidemiological study. There is need to know why more people are dying of renal failure, liver cancer and kidney problems when they do not indulge in attitude or have conditions that expose them to the diseases.
Whatever deadly substance put in the environment is eventually breathed in by people. It is clear that 75 per cent of diseases that affect man are from animals and most of them are from wild animals. Because of the rate that human beings expand, the boundary between wild animals and human beings narrows by the day. Because humans take over the animal habitat, they make contact with animals that were hitherto not in close proximity. While it is commonly believed among white race that most of the diseases are from Africa the truth remains that Africans are more far away from animals than in their part of the world. In the developed world, people have exotic animals as personal pets. Some of them have diseases especially the primate species who are human relatives. Some of these diseases are transmissible to man. So we live in a world that is getting smaller.
Veterinary Public Health helps us understand how to live in our environment and how to guide against punishing the environment and indirectly injuring ourselves. The aquatic field of the study focuses on aquatic species. To model this with the fish, everything the human use end up in the aquatic environment and they could be there for many years. The fish consumes them and accumulate them in their muscles. When human beings consume fish, they in return ingest the injurious chemicals. That is why it is recorded for example, that within the space of two decades, 20 people die of liver or renal disease. These are the detoxifying agents of the body. The spate of kidney and liver problem is alarming and it calls for epidemiological study to see what is in the environment that exposes humans to these illnesses[i].
[i] Punch, June 10, 2017
