Page 59 - VHSA - Onderstepoort 100 Years - Part 3

ONDERSTEPOORT 100
the chapters. This book was a major accomplishment, each edition taking several years to complete during which financial backing also had to be sought. G.R. Thomson and Tustin were co-editors of the first edition, and Tustin remained so for the second edition, in the production of which he played a key role.
L. (Leon) Prozesky joined the Section in 1974 after qualifying and soon proved to be a very able and versatile pathologist with a wide field of veterinary interests. In his research work he generally was a member of a team comprising colleagues from other sections of the Institute. As alluded to above his main interest lay in the light and electron microscopic pathology of heartwater and its cause, E. ruminantium. Other projects upon which he worked included hepatotoxicosis in sheep caused by the shrub Pteronia pallens, gousiekte in sheep caused by Pachystigma pygmaeum, pathology of the central nervous system of lambs born of ewes exposed to Diplodia maydis during gestation (see Part 3: Toxicology), rotavirus infections in piglets and calves in South Africa, and the pathology of lumpy skin disease.
When Coetzer moved to the Faculty in 1988 his succes- sor as head of Pathology at the Institute was Prozesky whose research staff included J.J. van der Lugt, J.A. Neser, S.S. Bastianello and J.H. Vorster, later to be joined by M.L. Penrith. A major turning point in the history of the Institute occurred in 1992 when it became affiliated to the Agricultural Research Council. Greater financial autonomy was accompanied by a change in its priorities from being science-based to a client- based approach. Consequently all activities were reorga- nized into interdisciplinary programmes to meet the needs of clients, the most important of which was soon identified as a dependable and efficient diagnostic service, and pathology was given the responsibility of integrating and managing all the diagnostic activities in the various disciplines into a
Temporary building erected at the Institute for the Pathology Department of the Faculty in 1977
single Diagnostic Programme. This was accomplished under the leadership of Prozesky and the programme soon became the main source of external income for the Institute. Research had to be scaled down, however, and when Prozesky left in 2000 to take up the chair in Pathology at the Faculty, financial constraints led to a further scaling down of activities. This, in effect, resulted in the end of the research programme of the Section of Pathology of the Onderstepoort Veterinary Institute. At present S.M. Njiro is responsible for the remaining pathology activities, but only for those emanating from the Institute itself, and for the implementation of a BSE (bovine spongiform encephalopathy or ‘mad cow disease’) surveillance programme which commenced in 2001, being commissioned to do so by the National Department of Agriculture.
At the time of the excorporation of the Faculty from the Institute and Public Service on 1 April 1973 only seven of 149 the then existing departments could be headed by full-time
professors. For this reason the relatively small Section of Veterinary Public Health, under L.W. van den Heever was placed in the newly-formed Department of Pathology, but it remained a separate entity. Pathology was headed by Tustin and initially staffed with one senior lecturer, I.B.J. van Rensburg, and three technicians and were later joined by other personnel. As no provision had yet been made on the fledgling campus to physically accommodate all the Faculty departments, four of them remained temporarily at the Institute, Pathology being one of them. With the exception of Veteri- nary Public Health which was first accommo- dated in the Abattoir Building of the Institute, the Department of Pathology was housed in the Pathology Building of the Institute until 1977 when a prefabricated building was
New BSE laboratory at the Institute, occupied in 2001
Pathology
1908-2008
Years