Page 102 - VHSA - Onderstepoort 100 Years - Part 3

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ERSTEPOORT 100
L.W. van den Heever, Head of the Section of Veterinary Food Hygiene and Public Health at the Institute from 1959-1973 and first full-time Professor of Veterinary
Public Health at the Faculty from 1973-1987
lectures, demonstrations and practical training in meat and milk hygiene, eggs and fish, the zoonoses, and diseases of the mammary gland. From 1963, two post-graduate courses were also offered by the Faculty of Veterinary Science, namely:
(a) A Diploma in Veterinary Public Health,
awarded after completion of a two-year
part-time course almost identical to that
given to medical graduates for the Diploma
in Public Health. This degree fully qualified
the veterinarian to become a member of
the public health team, as the curriculum
covered a wide range of public health subjects such as legislation and administration, water and sewage puri- fication, physiology of nutrition, elementary geology and meteorology, medical sociology, environmental sanitation, epidemiology, genetics, statistics, radiation, microbiology, parasitology, infectious diseases, town-planning, maps and plans and building construction.
Veterinary candidates devoted additional time to the zoonoses, foods of animal origin and import and export regulations relating to such foods.
(b) A Masters Degree in Veterinary Medi- cine (Food Hygiene) [MMedVet(Hyg)], with Food Hygiene and Public Health as major, and Parasitology, Infectious Diseases and Pathology as ancillary subjects. Two years of study were re- quired, and the candidates prepared and submitted seminars apart from doing formal examinations. A treatise on original work was also required.
By 1964 van den Heever had successfully
completed the Diploma in Veterinary Public
Health, a course which he had initiated in
conjunction with the Faculty of Medicine at
the University of Pretoria. In 1970 he was
awarded the MMedVet(Hyg) degree with a
dissertation entitled ‘Certain Health Aspects of Biltong’ and in April 1973 he was transferred into the full-time employ of the University of Pretoria as Associate Professor and head of the Section Veterinary Public Health within the Department of Pathology. In May of 1982 he was promoted to full professor in the same capacity and from January 1984 to the first post of Professor and head of a newly established independent Department of Veterinary Public Health − a position he retained until his retirement in 1987.
Veterinary public health at the Institute
after 1973
When van den Heever opted for the position at the Faculty on the latter’s independence in 1973, he was succeeded at the Institute by W.H. Giesecke who had worked under his
mentorship since 1966. In 1982 the latter was promoted to Assistant Director and after the reorganization of the Institute in 1992 became the Programme Manager for Veterinary Public Health. He continued in this position until 1995 when he relocated to Mmabatho as Director: Veterinary Ser- vices of the North-West Province where he retired in 2003. Under Giesecke’s guidance his section continued on the road established by his predecessor in the field of milk and meat hygiene, which entailed research and development, diagnostics and managing the Onderstepoort abattoir.
His specific interest was the manage- ment of udder health in lactating animals and his contribution to the control of mastitis in dairy herds was reflected by his membership of several Expert Groups of the International Dairy Federation. In 1981 he started promoting the use of
somatic cell counting (SCC) as a diagnostic test for mastitis in South Africa, standardizing the techniques and establishing critical thresholds. After publication of his results and the establishment of an inter-laboratory standardization scheme with Onderstepoort as the reference laboratory in 1983, re- gulations were published by the Department of Agriculture in 1985, establishing SCC as the standard diagnostic test for the disease. By 1986 there were 24 laboratories in South Africa and the neighbouring states participating in the scheme and
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PART 3
History of Individual Disciplines
1908-2008
Years