City University veterinary college is committed to Hong Kong’s public health mission and ‘One Health’ concept

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A clown fish receives eye surgery at Ocean Park. City University’s Jockey Club College of Veterinary Medicine and Life Sciences emphasises contributing to public health in Hong Kong by caring for all animals, not only pets, with aquatic veterinary medicine among its core concerns. Photo: Edward Wong

Published: 5:01am, 30 Aug 2018Updated: 5:01am, 30 Aug 2018

At City University’s Jockey Club College of Veterinary Medicine and Life Sciences, we wholeheartedly agree with the sentiments expressed in your editorial on August 27 (“Tie veterinary science to public health”) and assure your readership that a public health focus is very much a part of our mission.

The curriculum, carefully designed over a period of two years, in conjunction with our colleagues at Cornell University’s College of Veterinary Medicine, devotes a lot more space to subjects in our four core themes: food safety, animal welfare, emerging infectious diseases and aquatic veterinary medicine. We also sensitise the students to their important future contribution to public health early on in the course roll-out, and before students enter the clinical years and commence their veterinary medicine and surgery training.

The clinical part of the curriculum focuses on all species (“all creatures great and small”), not just pet animals. Therefore, we have to teach our students how to treat small pet animals, but in equal measure also production animal species, including fish, along with food safety and security, and the other core themes. Our commitment to the “One Health” concept is such that a course in “One Health” is actually placed in the first year of studies, and is the very first lecture that our veterinary students attend.

It will also be pertinent for your readers to know that in our hiring of faculty thus far we have been true to our mission; none of them would profess to be a specialist in small animal medicine or surgery. Thus far we have newly recruited specialists in animal welfare, aquatic veterinary medicine, emerging infectious diseases and food safety, the latter being also a speciality of mine, the dean of this college.

A pig stands in a pen at a pig farm in Yiyang county, in China’s central Henan province. Fearful of the effects on the country’s food supply, China’s Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Affairs has mobilised inspectors after several pigs were confirmed to have died of African swine fever in Shenyang, Liaoning province. Photo: AFP