Page 46 - VHSA - Onderstepoort 100 Years - Part 3

OND
ERSTEPOORT 100
the Faculty in 1979 as a research assistant. Her particular interests were the nematodes infecting zebras, for which she was awarded a PhD degree, and those infecting horses and donkeys. She also researched the biology of free-living H. contortus larvae on artificial pastures. Because of her interest in the helminhs of horses and donkeys it seemed natural that the focus of her research should shift to the welfare of the traction animals on which resource-poor rural communities are so heavily dependent.
Adriano Vatta graduated as a veterinarian in 1998 and joined the Institute staff immediately thereafter. His research interests are the effect of wireworm (H. contortus) infection in goats belonging to persons in rural communities.
Kerstin Junker joined her husband, Joop Boomker, as a post-doctoral fellow in 2005, and has been working on the internal parasites of guineafowls. She is considered the South African expert on the taxonomy of the pentastomids, or tongue worms.
From the very inception of the Institute the study
of parasites of South African wildlife has been
seen as a priority by the parasitologists employed there. Bedford described the lice and ticks infesting wild animals, Mönnig and Ortlepp the tapeworms and roundworms of these animals, Gertrud Theiler and Jane Walker the ticks, and Anna Verster the tapeworms of wild carnivores.
Both Mönnig and Horak had mixed success with artificially infecting domestic livestock with the helminths of herbivorous wildlife, while Verster had the same experience when attempting to infect domestic dogs with tapeworm cysts, or measles, collected from the muscles, organs
and abdominal cavities of wild herbivores. In recent
times wildlife farming has become a flourishing industry in its own right, and since 1980 several parasitologists loosely led by Horak and Boomker have accumulated a wealth of data on the biology of naturally occurring parasites of South African wildlife. Thus it has been found that blue and black wildebeest are resistant to tick infestation from a very young age, that African buffaloes acquire resistance to the blue tick, B. decoloratus, at about 1 year of age, that scrub hares are
hosts to the immature stages of a large number of ticks that as adults infect domestic livestock,
and that they also harbour a number of species of worms that infest wildlife in their surrounds, that normal healthy antelope can harbour tick burdens exceeding 10 000 individuals, and worm burdens
exceeding 20 000 individuals.
This data taken in conjunction with the mainly taxonomic findings published by the early
parasitologists implies that the parasites of wildlife in South Africa have probably been better documented than those in most other regions of
the world. Not only have numerous parasites been described, but their life cycles, host preferences,
geographic distributions, and seasonal occurrences have been determined. In addition, non-
distressing methods of control specifically designed for the administration of pesticides to wild animals have been developed.
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PART 3
History of Individual Disciplines
1908-2008
Years