Page 63 - VHSA - Onderstepoort 100 Years - Part 3

help in this work was very much appre- ciated. A.J. (Alan) Guthrie at the faculty helped with the electrocardiograms and Prof A.J. (Braam) Bezuidenhout with ana- tomical studies. With the rapid growth of the poultry industry and the ever increasing demand for imported poultry vaccines an increasing burden was placed on the experienced staff of the Poultry Section which was required to screen the produc- tion protocols of the vaccines to be im- ported. In the end this became a State function and was handled efficiently by A.C.E. (Carine) Pienaar who had worked in the Poultry Section before transferring to the new Poultry Department of the Faculty.
Another problem involved the recruit-
ment of professional staff, as vacancies had
to be filled with new graduates who had
to work off their State loans and seemed
to prefer poultry work at Onderstepoort to
being posted to the field or an abattoir, despite the lack of an explicit interest in poultry. They did their work while dreaming of what they were going to do once they became free. One of these ‘captive researchers’ even claimed
that he could not carry out poultry post-
mortems as he was allergic to feathers.
Others, however, came to the Poultry Sec-
tion of their own free will and carried their
share of the routine and some also used
this as a training ground for future employ-
ment in the industry. Amongst them were
Fanie Greyling, Enslie Marais, Peter Barnes
and Jean Cilliers, to name just a few.
ONDERSTEPOORT 100
Chlamydia psittaci and, very recently, also in a slightly different form, in farmed salt- water crocodiles in Papua New Guinea, a return to Coles’ former subject.
In 1991 the prolonged visit by Profes- sor G.F. (Gordon) Bennett of the World Reference Centre for Avian Haematozoa, then of the Memorial University of St John’s, Newfoundland, and the temporary recruit- ment of R.A. (Roy) Earlé sparked a flurry of papers on bird blood parasites including the description of a new Aegyptianella species from guinea fowls and of a Babesia from penguins which Coles previously had diagnosed as Aegyptianella. The main out- come of this co-operation was the pub- lication of a host-parasite catalogue of the blood parasites of the sub-Saharan birds. While still at the Faculty and under pressure to improve his academic standing, Huchzermeyer had commenced working
on malaria in turkeys which was the subject of his PhD thesis which he submitted after his retirement in 1996.
In the early 1980s the Poultry Diseases Section was sepa- rated from the Department of Infectious Diseases of the Faculty and established as an independent department. With the co-operation of State and Industry a new poultry laboratory was then built. In 1989 Louis Coetzee was appointed as professor and head of the department. This then led to the closure of the Poultry Section
of the Institute, as mentioned above, and 153 all poultry functions as well as most of
the staff went across the road to the
Faculty. Based on his experience as a poultry specialist in the industry, Coetzee changed
the approach from a reactive problem- oriented one to that of a pro-active poultry health programme. The emphasis in both his lectures and in the service aspect of his department was on enabling the client to avoid the health risks which threatened the production of his flock and thus to keep it healthy rather than to concentrate on the treatment of diseases. To achieve this he de- veloped an Integrated Health Plan which included monitoring of flocks by means of a diagnostic laboratory utilizing the latest molecular technologies.
In 1990 he negotiated a contract with the Directorate of Animal Health of the De- partment of Agriculture to act as a central Poultry Reference Centre which was also supported by the S.A. Poultry Association.
When the new poultry laboratory was opened at the Faculty in 1989 it was decided to close the Poultry Section of the Institute. Huchzermeyer then elected to concentrate on crocodiles and ostriches, forming the Ostrich and Crocodile Unit within the Pathology Section under L. (Leon) Prozesky. An outcome of this work was the production by Huchzermeyer of two books on ostriches published by the ARC-OVI. These were Ostrich Diseases, and Diseases of Ostriches and Other Ratites published in 1994 and 1998 respectively. They were subsequently translated into five languages including Chinese. A book on crocodiles, entitled Crocodiles: Bibliography, Husbandry and Diseases followed in 2003. He retired from the Institute in 1996. The crocodile work led to the discovery of chlamydiosis in farmed Nile crocodiles in southern Africa caused by an agent closely related to
“ An outcome of this work was the production by Huchzermeyer of two books on ostriches. These were Ostrich Diseases, and Diseases of Ostriches and Other Ratites published in 1994 and 1998 respectively. They were subsequently translated into five languages including Chinese.”
Poultry Diseases
1908-2008
Years